As a young history undergraduate student, one class required us to purchase The Communist Manifesto. My immediate reaction was “Oh fucking great. Another super expensive mega tome to buy.” Imagine my surprise to discover it was only a few dozen pages and cost only three dollars.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 21, 1848--
I don’t remember many details because an Audi’s worth of beer has been consumed since I read it. A lot of people say “Oh Marxism! Evil!” and I’d just like to point out that Karl Marx had a co-author named Friedrich Engels. Off to refresh my memory.
Karl and Friedrich were philosophers, both well-educated and coming from wealthy families, so they were totally in tune with people who lived in disease-ridden squalor and dug coal for a living. Sarcasm. Still, they got some shit right in that little book published on February 21, 1848. There is truth in the claim that “society is the history of class struggles.” Especially when you consider that “class” is a bullshit concept that humans made up as a method of control, with the more ruthless motherfuckers gaining ascendancy via coercion and coopting.
Wealth inevitably concentrates toward a center (the bourgeoisie); a center that is willing to lie, cheat, steal, and murder to acquire and acquire. It goes further. There are those who want to be led, and those willing to be led astray, reinforcing the power dynamics that let the ruthless rule. People are often ready to sell out their neighbor for a crumb, and this has been exploited across the ages.
Where they shit the bed was proclaiming the working class “proletariat” would put an end to such class struggles, they said it was inevitable. It’s been over 170 years—how is that working out? We’ve seen several attempts at implementing Marxism; in the Soviet Union people lined up for hours for a pair of shoes that didn’t fit.
But the manifesto had some good ideas that have been introduced for the betterment of many, such as progressive income taxes, abolition of child labor, and publicly-funded education. But these were the manifesto’s short-termdemands. The commie utopia wasn’t going to be achieved via such “reformism.” This was about revolution!
Except revolution is often bullshit. There is no clearer example of the depths to which we suck than the tale of the successful rebel. Throughout history the story repeats. There is an oppressive leader or regime. A group of people rise up against them and are successful in removing the despots from power, seizing the leadership for themselves. And then once they have tasted that power, they begin to employ the same vicious strategies and tactics of oppression to maintain their newfound status that caused them to rise up in the first place. Otherwise, people would flee to Cuba rather than from it. (Hitting a private resort for a week of mojitos and melanoma doesn’t count).
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It never ceases to amaze me how -- throughout history -- the authors of the philosophies, idealogies, etc., that become the most publicly known fail to consider the inevitability of philosophies, idealogies, etc., being corrupted to the point of being virtually unrecognizable, to suit the purpose of whomever is grasping for power at any given point in time. It's almost as if the vast majority of those philosophers were raised and educated in some sort of bubble of power and privilege 😉