Posted on 11/21/2011 9:31:43 PM PST by goldstategop
November 1989, Moscow
During the Polish anti-Communist revolt, spearheaded by the workers, a joke swept through Poland. According to the story, the Communist dictator couldnt figure out what to do in order to put down the uprising. So he went to Moscow to visit Lenins tomb for inspiration and the Soviet authorities closed it down to let him meditate there.
Oh Lenin, said President Wojciech Jaruzelski, the situation is terrible. Thecountry is in turmoil; the economy is collapsing; counterrevolutionaries are everywhere, the imperialists are subverting Poland, and the church is backing the revolt. What should I do?
Suddenly, Lenin, mummified as he was, came to life, sat up, and shouted, Arm the workers!
November 2011, New York City
The bear-like man with wild hair and long beard waddled down the lower Manhattan street. That old mole, revolution, has stuck its head up into the air again, sniffed the carbon dioxide laden firmament, and didnt scurry back down into the hole. A specter was haunting the world all right.
He was excited to see it first-hand. But the sight was a shock. This was no organized group of class-conscious proletarians but the flotsam of bourgeois society. Drug users and sex fiends; spoiled brats from the upper bourgeoisie, and anarchists.
He had written about:
The social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
Perhaps his first impression was misleading or perhaps this movement was indeed a tool of reactionary intrigue. He must investigate further.
Marx takes aside a young man. He notes the fellow is altogether scraggly, dressed in tattered clothes, unbathed and unshaven. No doubt he is starving having been cast aside by the factory where he was hitherto overworked and underpaid. With his keen eye, Marx notes he is wearing some kind of canvas shoes, not even being able to afford leather ones! On all of his clothes are small logos. How disgusting, Marx thinks, he must bear the free advertising of giant corporations or go naked!
Excuse me, says Marx, have you been thrown out of your 12-hour a day factory job due to over-production? Is that why you are here?
No. I have $150,000 in college loans to get my degree in conflict resolution and I dont want to pay it back.
Marx was puzzled, But then you took a factory job as a wage slave to support yourself?
No, was the reply. Im waiting for a job resolving international conflicts. Until then, Im living in my parents mansion. There was a strange musical sound. Sorry, dude, cant talk to you right now. My smart phone is ringing. The young ma presses a button on the strange device and speaks into it: Hey! Did you get the email I sent you from my computer? What? Oh, sorry, it must have been from my I-Pad II. Speak louder, I cant hear you because my MP3 player is on too loud!
Marx was astounded. As he wandered around the make-shift camp, he saw support for many strange causes and reflected about what hed written in The Communist Manifesto about,
Economists, philanthropists, humanitarians reformers of every imaginable kind, who never really understood society.
The more he walked around, the more suspicious Marx became. This supposed revolutionary protest was being supported by the government and financed by speculators like George Soros. That same government was subsidizing big corporations that made large donations to its election and by its favorite trade unions which were enriching themselves.
He must look further into these issues. So he rented a car and drove on and on, from California to the New York island; from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. And as he drove down that ribbon of highway, heres what he didnt see:
All the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor. Yet the working people had the strongest and most loving families.
The bourgeoisie has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest .It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor in the icy water of egotistical calculation. Yet the people have not become so depraved. Theyre still clinging.
Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers .Slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. Yet such nineteenth-century conditions have nothing to do with contemporary life.
The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious . Yet progress has brought higher living standards.
The proletarian is without property. Subjection to capital has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion are to him so many bourgeois prejudices . Yet all of these things survive.
Freedom in such a society merely means free trade, free selling and buying. Yet the people treasured freedom.
Those who acquire anything, do not work. Yet such people worked very hard.
The workers have no country. Yet the people loved their country.
Then Marx realized what had happened. It was the political and intellectual elitenot the bourgeoisie and proletariatthat had abandoned religion, family, patriotism, and productive work. This new aristocracy was akin to that existing in feudal times.
Marx himself had written, In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Had not Marx explained that this was a king of socialism representing a reactionary interest and serving those who controlled the government as a weapon for fighting the bourgeoisie.?
Is this what was happening: An aristocracy of government bureaucrats, politicians, and such using the downtrodden as a front to expand their own privileges?
And then Marx resolved to understand what had happened under Marxist regimes. He went to a major university and a professor spotted him and almost fainted. Karl, he said with his voice full of worship, We dont even let anyone teach here who isnt a Marxist!
He brushed the flattery aside and plunged into serious research. He discovered that all of his predictions had proven wrong.
The Marxist regimes had not put an end to the exploitation of one individual by another. They had intensified it. These Communist governments had done precisely what he accused the bourgeoisie of doing! They had torn up religion, family, morality, and reduced workers to slave soldiers without property or rights.
He had predicted that Communism would end, The hostility of one nation to another, yet it had intensified war, bloodshed, and imperialistic exploitation.
Marx had predicted the withering away of the state (When class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.)
And here he saw one of the great flaws in his thinking:
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state . He had viewed the state as some kind of machine with no life of its own. Yet the state was controlled by people and through political power this new class also controlled the means of production, albeit in a much more unrestricted and dictatorial way than the bourgeoisiediverse and divided, as he often explainedhad ever done.
As Marx had written: Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of socialism ended in a miserable hangover.
Returning to a contemplation of contemporary society, Marx asked himself a question. If the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, what was the current class alignment?
On one hand, there is a parasitic group, a feudal aristocracy creating no wealth but merely enriching itself from control over the government, Ultimately, it controlled the means of production through regulation and taxation, providing favored capitalists with a largesse earned by others. Its allies were a labor aristocracy that was paid far more than its private sector counterparts and a lumpenproletariat. Internationally this ruling establishment is allied with the most reactionary clerical-fascists.
On the other hand, there were hard-working people, proletarians and the productive petit-bourgeoisie. There were capitalists, too, but at least these were productive ones who had lifted their societies out of the stark poverty of his own times into the most free, most beneficial societies for the common people in world history.
Marx reached a decision. He ran out of the college library, out the gate, and into the street. Hailing a cab, he jumped in and told the driver: Quick, comrade, take me to the nearest Tea Party!
Nothing at all! So dear readers, derive what lesson you like from this parable and may God be with you!
Trolling?
I can believe if Karl Marx were alive today, he would join the Tea Party
And therein lies the fallacy of the sock puppet fight between "corporations are evil" and "government is evil."
It was a different century then. A scientist has to conform to the facts, not to theory. The ironic point is the Left of course is nothing like the theory predicted and instead of being oppressed, the proletarians enjoy a higher standard of living and more freedom than ever before! Any serious study of our modern life would lead to this conclusion. We’re not living in the 19th Century anymore and the Communist Manifesto is no longer an accurate description of existing social reality. So yes, I can believe the scientist would have to change his views. One must discover the facts from life. Its the basis of the scientific method.
thats it! one funny album of the day.
Unfortunately untrue.
There is no precise definition of who the "working class" is in America today.
An emerging one appears to be those without a college degree.
This group, sadly, has a much worse record recently with regard to divorce, illegitimacy and all the other symptoms of family breakdown than the more elite degreed population.
I do not know whether the non-working underclass is included in these stats or not.
political science is the only ‘science’ where the ‘scientist’ can decide what is a fact.
Exactly. Advice to the clueless:
1) Marx lied.
2) He lied for the rich, because the bourgeois middle class was growing to happy successful, powerful and free.
3) He lied so that stupid young people would attack their own families and destroy their own countries in the name of defeating the rich, so that the rich would not be threatened by the happy middle class.
4) That explains the "mystery" of communist billionares like Soros, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and their millionaire enablers like Clinton, Pelosi, Boxer, Feinstein and the rest of Congress.
Yes, Karl Marx would back off his initial thesis, based on 19th century London, because it is no longer the 19th century and he was never stupid...just unnerved by the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution...he would have been the first to have admitted that he was wrong as a soothsayer. Flame me now my comrades.
Marx was actually a drunkard who often wrote satanic poetry, dreamed of world domination, hated everyone and lorded over people, who also got a maid pregnant and refused to take responsibility for the child. No one knows what ever happened to that kid. Sounds like an OWS protester to me.
amusing but Marx was a nutjob who never worked a day in his life, lived off the largess of Engels and would fit right in with the OWS crowd.
You pegged it. There is no difference between Marx and the spoiled rotten brats at OWS.
Ah, so you are trolling. It is not enough to call the Manifesto an anachronism, if the very theory behind it was false even back thenper the scientific method, which would show that centralization would not have been viable in 1847 or in any other year of that century.
It was a different century then. A scientist has to conform to the facts, not to theory. The ironic point is the Left of course is nothing like the theory predicted and instead of being oppressed, the proletarians enjoy a higher standard of living and more freedom than ever before! Any serious study of our modern life would lead to this conclusion. Were not living in the 19th Century anymore and the Communist Manifesto is no longer an accurate description of existing social reality. So yes, I can believe the scientist would have to change his views. One must discover the facts from life. Its the basis of the scientific method
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