So, I read Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, more commonly known as the Communist Manifesto, last night. Some passages I wanted to share with everyone... We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class; to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production. These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless in the most advanced countries the following will be pretty generally applicable: 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries: gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of childrens factory labor in its present form. Combining education with industrial production, etc., etc. Any of this sound familiar? A few more... In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend to do. From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes! You must, therefore, confess that by individual you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible. Is any of this sounding familiar or unsettling yet? The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint are not deserving of serious examination. Quiet, people who disagree! Im not interested in FACTS or CONFLICTING IDEAS! Now THAT sounds familiar... Interesting note about Germany way back before World War I... The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution. Yeah, Im pretty sure we all know how that turned out. Were going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. Oh wait, that wasnt the Communist Manifesto. That was Hillary Clinton who said that. I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. And that last one was Barack Obama! Tell me we arent sliding towards communism. Authoritarianism for the common good is still authoritarianism. The divisions of liberal/conservative, republican/democrat, and left/right to not apply anymore. Here is the scale as it exists in reality... Authoritarian Libertarian If you dont want to be a libertarian, whatever. But at least be intellectually honest about what you are if you opt not to be libertarian: authoritarian. Live long and prosper.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:33:08 +0000
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