Maura Pennington, Contributor
I write about my lost generation and our unmet expectations
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A portrait of Karl Marx. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
"The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling so as to win the battle of democracy."
"”Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in a 1975 lecture to the AFL-CIO that "Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat-ax." It's not an ideology based on a higher truth, he told them. It can't be defended by any rational arguments; hence the insanity of all communist regimes in action. Despite being faced with this reality decades ago, however, people are still deceived by the rhetoric. The fervor for reform in America today shares in the same spirit of class struggle that inspired Marx and Engels in the 1840s. Were someone to substitute the word "corporations" or the catch-all "1%" for the word "bourgeoisie," The Communist Manifesto would chillingly read like any official statement from Occupiers and the 99% movement at large.
This doesn't have to be the case. The sorest issue for those agitating for a new world order this year is theoretically the same problem Marx had: "the exploitation of the many by the few." If people were wise, though, the similarity would stop there. Instead, activists in the United States have phrased our ills and the proposed cure of democratization to make it an eerie echo of communist ideology, which has already failed horrendously and at great human cost across the globe.
Communism kills in practice, but maintains an allure in theory because fools still fall for it. Americans, of all people, shouldn't be those fools. We should innately know the difference between the democracy of which our Founders spoke and the democracy of a perverted social order that actively destroys those at the top in favor of, as Marx calculated, "the nine-tenths." But the gateway to communist rhetoric was opened when the first Occupy camp set up on Wall Street, a financial center, and not Washington, the seat of government.
When the great American tracts for freedom were written in the 18th Century, we were not an industrial world. Their primary purpose was to assert political liberty and democracy as a form of government. In no way were they meant to affirm economic equality. So when the 99% movement reveals their aim to be "a democracy that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people" yet only lists grievances that are based on the current situation of our economy, it is not the same idea of democracy as opposition to political tyranny. It is instead the idea that 19th Century intellectuals advanced of democracy as a resolution of economic inequity. For Americans today, the 1% is an oppressive economic class, not political class.
In this way, our 99% does not emulate American revolutionaries but is instead after the same bourgeoisie that troubled Marx. He wrote in The Communist Manifesto that, "the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway." Compare this to the 99% claim that we suffer due to "the deliberate manipulation of our democracy and our economy by a tiny minority in the 1%, by those who amass ever more wealth and power at our expense." Marx insisted: "Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society." Our 99% also thinks that a crisis is upon us: "We are at a crossroads as a country. We have a choice to make." So what was the bourgeoisie doing then and what is our 1% doing now that is so unbearable? Almost the same things.
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Maura Pennington you would have us believe the government of we the people, by the people and for the collective of we the people of the United States is a Communist, Marxist, Socialist concept. Never mind it has worker so well for Capitalism and making the United States the great prosperous Nation it is.
Communism, Socialism and Marxism propaganda is a call to arms, targets and enlist “suckers” to blindly support special interests under the auspicies of patriotism. The same interests that have undermined the value of labor in America and created employment and grew the economy in Communist China for the benefit of a few and detriment of many here in the United States.
The Founding Fathers and their irk, the Private Sector, oppressed millions with slavery in the United States. It was the Private Sector in America who kidnapped, enslaved, raped, branded, tortured, maimed and murdered tens of millions for generations over two hundred years with impunity.
No other people, nowhere on earth, throughout history oppressed so many for so long and so bad.
The Private sector raped, oppressed, and enslaved for over two hundred years. mmm curious. Your wrong slavery has been around for thousands of years. Where whole socialist governments like Egypt, and many Feudalistic societies based on religious communism, god thus placed you in our leadership you are the best placed there just because. Everyone else labors and is given home, food, entertainment and protection. Feaduism, or slaver as you will. Private sector is a word you seem to think is at the result of slavery. Again wrong. Private sector was the one that ended world slaverly my friend. It went from Full Government socialist enslavements like Egypt to Feudalism where slave dirvers need not be on the property to watch. Then to Democracy where individuals own their own. Slavery again was based on the slavery you so suckerly speak of was because of African socialist governments selling their people as slaves, as did many socialist governments, or fedualist governments did before that. In which, folks like Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and the rest wrote that they are working on destroying slavery with free markets. So all humans can be free and own their own. Again they just used slaverly for a very short time, 200 years is not reality, as maybe the first 50 years then after that slaverly serioulsy started to break up and individuals started the green lantern or what you know as the underground railroad. Which is only dated to a specific time after it was found.
So again friend your wrong we have come from socialist and communism (feudalism) into free markets. The free markets or privatization has almost completely done with slaverly in the world. Thanks to all cultures being able to own their own individual lands, property and weapons, along with political affilations. So my brother, in the guerilla hat. You speaking to a Mac. Private enterprises freed the African’s and the world slaves.
Rider i Anti Economic Warfare Blog Post.
Ms. Pennington,
You have missed the key difference between Karl Marx and all contemporary activists whom you categorize as 99%ers: Karl Marx advocated for the abolition of private property. He argued that the working class must seize the “means of production”, i.e. industry itself must wrested from control of the capitalists. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), a man no one would contest was a Marxist, not only firmly believed what Marx believed but put into practice. All of the portions of the Communist Manifesto that you quoted are secondary to its central demand to confiscation of factories. One would be hard pressed to find anyone arguing this today in the United States.
The reason is that this whole concept is largely meaningless in today’s USA. Most of the “means of production” no longer even exist in the United States, they have long ago been shifted overseas. How could the “proletariat” rise up and seize the factories that no longer exist? Most of the OWS crowd have no real idea who Karl Marx was or what distinguished his followers from others.
So you comparisons between the Communist Manifesto and the writings of the OWS movement are quite superficial and without substance.
Ah, yes. The reason no one is arguing for the abolition of property is because there is no property to abolish. Of course. And here I thought we weren’t living in a dystopia.
Ms. Pennington,
You answer is of course an attempt at irony but it was not ironic at all.
If one were to imagine that the United States was a company which had a customer services department, then one could image how the customer services manager would address the Occupy Wall Street movement. The first rule of customer service is that for each person who calls in to complain about a product or service, there are nine who do not. There is plenty of research on what separates the dissatisfied customers who complain from those who do not but that is irrelevant to the present issue. Suffice it to say, there a variety of variables that separate these two groups, they do not outwardly resemble each other very much. However, the wise customer service manager knows that it is fatal to disregard to the complainers because they are only the minority. The majority who are still disaffected will express their dismay but in less immediately measureable fashions.
So for each person who shows up for a single event, there are perhaps a 100 who cannot make the effort or are otherwise unable to attend but share the dissatisfaction. For each person who has actually camped out, there are probably 1,000 who had to be doing something else but is equally unhappy. That the people who do not attend may look, act, dress, speak, and otherwise not resemble to demonstrators does not change the fact that the demonstrators "represent" the non-demonstrators in very important ways.
The key link between these two groups is despair and desperation. All across this country there are people losing their jobs, their homes, and their futures. Some are becoming homeless and hungry. As unemployment insurance runs out, their numbers will become larger. The "complainers" have realized that they have nothing to lose, action is their only option. As the number of people who become destitute, the number who will take action will increase. The proportion of "complainers" will increase.
The United States was once the largest industrial manufacturing economies in the world. It supported a huge number of workers who earned good pay and benefits. This produced a bell shaped curve of income distribution, the bulge in the center being the "middle class". This was the engine of what was once called “The American Dream”. Income was distributed along a more or less bell shaped curve, with the central bulge being what was whimsically called the “middle class”. However as the industrial base of the US has declined over the last four decades, these middle strata of workers has been slowly declining. The City of Detroit is the bellwether of this process. Once the industrial envy of the world, it supported a huge industrial working class with single family detached homes and two car garages. Further, it supported huge service sector which provided the needs of those industries and workers. Today it is a dusty ghost-town.
This is the real issue, not that workers are being crushed by factory owners but that they have no jobs at all.
First and foremost the 1% you speak of are those folks whose family or themselves have been socially adapted via economic votes of value to the leadership chair. So if we take Marxist view how would we decide those who lead our economic major issues. Just by basic popularity, education, or through shear family and competitive ideas of capitalism. Deliberately manipulate the Democracy. You mean if you have their own network of cultural value battles between each other yes. But no the top 1% are just like the other 99%. They are different and do not necessarily like each others values and they play fairly with economics they own. For example you say the top 1% run the government and economics. Well Carter, Clinton, Obama, Bush Sr, Reagan and Nixon all came from poor 99% class families that they competed in society to become voted for the best via economic value and political values.
I do not believe in marxism. As how would capital and labor and seats be divided. In Marxism it is based on a theory he never solves for. Which is spread of power and wealth. In Democracy and Capitalism it is based on competition of votes by economic abilities to lead and values of social governance the whole like as they can see the top economic competitors compete for what they have earned. Which is the best way to decide who leads in my opinion. Marxism is a genocidal spread of slave labor to those who are the most oppressive and willing to be the most criminal to lead.
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