-Caveat Lector-
~~for educational purposes only~~
[Title 17 U.S.C. section 107]
A Layman's Look at the Communist Manifesto
by John Keller
Partially Educated
The Communist Manifesto is one of those documents I was aware
of, but had never taken the time to actually read. As a
woefully undereducated product of the public education
system, I somehow managed to slip by the class that required
reading of the old Marx and Engels classic. So, in the course
of continuing liberty self-education, I found a translation
on the web in order to better understand this failed canon
of anti-freedom. My reaction: wow. The Communist Manifesto,
written in 1848, looks a lot like the Democrat Party Positions,
written in 2000.
The Pseudo-History of Class Warfare
The first chapter of the Manifesto is a rambling pseudo-history
that rails against the bourgeois as the historically
re-incarnated oppressors vis-à-vis the continually oppressed
proletariat. I was reminded of the slave reparations, minority
oppression, women oppression, and other Democrat Party class
based arguments. The second chapter is a lengthy list of
"Bourgeois" complaints against the generally perceived
Communist aims, and the communist response to them. Among
the Bourgeois complaints the manifesto defends are: abolition
of family, abolition of religion, socialization of education,
and abolition of nations. Does this remind us of current
complaints within the political system? Interestingly, the
manifesto presents the following observation regarding the
abolition of nations:
National differences and antagonism between peoples are
daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development
of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the
world market, to uniformity in the mode of production
and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
This is a fairly prescient assessment, given the
franchise-ization of the world. As an aside, I spent 9
months in various cities as part of my job in 1998. The
thing that surprised me most in my tour of 30-odd medium
and large American town was the uniformity. Like Edward
Norton in Fight Club, I found the same hotel soaps in the
same hotels, next to the same Applebee’s or Chili’s. It
was Generica, not America. That, however, is a different
article; one that addresses how government zoning laws
and tax schemes aide and abet big business in destroying
small, local competition. Back to the original point,
however, I wonder what Marx and Engels saw as the downside
to the vanishing of "antagonism between peoples" that
bourgeoisie and freedom of commerce had brought about.
I suppose it was their follow-on predication, which is
wrong.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them (national
differences and antagonism) to vanish still faster.
The Tyranny of Democracy
Like any wacko manifesto, the Communist Manifesto has just
enough facts, just enough history, and just enough lucid
observations to cover the other 90% of it, which is utter
crap. One of the lucid observations in the Manifesto, is
that the proletariat constitute the majority of the population.
The communists realized that by organizing the proletariat
politically, they could just vote themselves more power.
This is one of the two the real gems of chapter two. It
explains a great deal about the tyranny of democracy, and
the modus operandi of our current political parties.
The Politics of Jealousy
The other gem in chapter two immediately follows the
observation that the proletariat must first seize control
of "political supremacy". Once that is accomplished, well,
Marx and Engels say it best: "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…" The Democrats, like the
Communists, realize that by dividing people into groups,
all with a chip on their shoulder against the oppressor,
they can vote themselves chunks of the oppressors’ property.
Let’s call this the politics of jealousy and victimhood. I
suppose this explains how communism could organize itself,
at least initially. There will always be people of
extraordinary talent running businesses, inventing new
things, and generally pushing the boundaries of science,
technology, and commerce. Let’s use Bill Gates as an example
of this natural elite. For every Bill Gates, there are a
thousand Joe Programmers at Microsoft who are smart and
talented. They are the second line of the elite, in Marx’s
view, the bourgeois. For every Joe Programmer at Microsoft,
there are a thousand Mary Secretaries, a thousand Bob
Lawnmower, a thousand Doug Factoryworker, and Susie
Governmentbureaucrat; these are the proletariat in the
Marxian view. None of them have the combination of mental
ability, circumstance, and determination that Bill Gates
has, and most of them know it. However, these thousands
have a lot more votes than Bill and his programmers. Those
votes are political power, and the Marxists know it.
The 10 Measures of Communism
And how will the proletariat use their political clout to
wrest capital away from the capitalists? With the 10 measures
Marx and Engels laid out in 1848. As the master communists
aver, the exact implementation will vary slightly from county
to country, but will follow the general thrust of the measures.
Here are the 10 measures the proletariat will use to bring
about the full realization of the communist utopian dream,
once they have the political power:
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 rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants
and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks 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 obligation of all to work. Establishment of
industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing
industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction
between town and country by a more equable
distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.
Abolition of children's factory labor in its present
form. Combination of education with industrial
production, etc.
Take a second to compare them with the Democrat Party Positions.
Note that the communists speak in terms of oppressed and
oppressor, guilty rich, and noble worker, just like the
Democrats. Solely by observing the title link of the various
positions, you can see the Democrats place no value on Americans
in general, but play race and class warfare by dividing people
into ethnic, social, gender, and special interest groups.
Observations on The Communist Goals
Here are the 10 points from the Communist Manifesto again,
with a few observations.
1. Abolition of property in land and application
of all rents of land to public purposes.
The communist revolution is about half successful here.
Private property rights are eroded daily in this country.
Property Tax in most areas goes directly to fund the "public
purpose" of public education. (confer #10). The US government
is the single largest land owner, but instead of selling off
"public" land, the government continues to acquire more under
the guide of "protecting wilderness" or some other such
nonsense. The land under direct federal control is not the
only property held by the government. The use of executive
branch regulatory edicts to put severe restrictions on private
property has the effect of putting much more property in the
hands of the government. Do you really own that South Florida
beachfront property if you can’t build a beach house on it?
As long as it’s to save the Red Mangrove, Loggerhead
Turtle, and Brown Pelican, you see.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Can someone please explain how a flat tax RATE is not
already graduated? A truly flat tax would be something
like $500 per person per year. A graduated tax is 5%
per person per year. A punitive tax on innovation and
achievement is our current manipulative system. When
historians look back at the United States, they will ask
how, in this day and age of instant access to information
and history, a people could fail to see the obvious
parallels between the Gestapo, the KGB, and the IRS. They
all use fear, intimidation, spying, and invasion of privacy
to keep people in line. This awful agency should be abolished
and replaced with nothing. The tax code is such an obvious
tool of social manipulation that it absolutely disgusts me.
Do you think its any coincidence that the tax code has a
marriage penalty, and the number of unmarried couples
living together has gone up? Check off one of the previously
stated goals of the communists as partially achieved:
abolition of the family.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Well, the current Estate Tax rate of 55% means we’re just
over half way towards this one. Part of the communist goal
of ultimate state power is the destruction of the family
(outlined in chapter 2 of the manifesto). One of the ties
that bind families together, as well as encourage parents
to work for the betterment of their children is the promise
of leaving an estate or inheritance. By legislating that the
property owned and accumulated over a lifetime can’t be
passed on, we help replace the idea of the parent and
family with the idea of a benevolent state. Further, the
idea of ownership of one’s labor and the property earned
by it is undermined. One of the tests of ownership is the
ability to grant a thing to another person. If you aren’t
free to do that, you don’t really own something.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
The US has relatively few emigrants, but we have plenty
of rebels. While assorted tax resistors and government
regulatory resistors fall in the rebel category, the new
favorite catch-all prosecutorial group is "suspected" drug
dealers. Suppose I sell my 1986 Honda CRX for $800 cash, then
drive to the bank to deposit it, get stopped on the way,
searched (under duress, naturally), and the cop decides the
cash might be used for drugs. Buh-bye cash. I just might be
a drug dealer. I’m suspected, and suspicion is all it takes.
No need to worry about due process or anything, kind of like
Salem, circa 1692. This is the drug war. Police Forces can
confiscate your entire house if they find one pot leaf in
it. The same holds true for your car, or boat. Having
a pile of money that could be used to buy drugs is
suspicious.
The drug war has flown this one in under the Radar of most
commie-fighting Republicans who roundly support the new
prohibition, but as Marx and Engels noted "The forms these
take will vary from country to country". The Communists are
ends-justify-the means kind of folks.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state,
by means of a national bank with state capital and
an exclusive monopoly.
Done. Don’t think so? Quick, who’s Chairman of the Federal
Reserve? That’s right, our good friend, Alan Greenspan. He
and the rest of the board set the prime-lending rate, and
control the money supply. In my Keynesian slanted Macro
Economic class, they called this "fiscal and monetary
policy". After a good dose of Austrian economics, I now
spot it as "Objective 5 of the Communist Manifesto Government
Command Economy" or "taxation via inflation". Control of
the banking system by the fed is so complete that Wall
Street, the supposed paragon of free-market capitalism,
wags up and down to the mumblings of a single un-elected
bureaucrat.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and
transport in he hands of the state.
AT&T was a government sanctioned monopoly for 70 years.
Thanks to the heroic Carter Phone Company making a phone
other than black, and suing to break the government imposed
monopoly, the communications industry has been making
spectacular progress after begin stifled for three-quarters
of a century, thanks to Uncle Stalin, errr, Sam. Jeremy
Sapienza asks if we might not be online in 1950 if not for
Intellectual Property restrictions. Given that the telephone
took 67 years to get to 50% of US households thanks to the
strangling effects of monopoly status, compared with 6
years for the World Wide Web to hit 50%, Mr. Sapienza
may be right.
While the free market has broken the communications
impasse electronically, the real world still has only
one choice for "first class" mail, and the transportation
system is still in the hands of the state. Think about
this the next time you’re in traffic. When was the last
time you went to a grocery store where the checkout
lines were routinely so frustratingly long that the
patrons started shooting each other. I would love nothing
better than for a private company to start leasing tracts
of land on the north side of Atlanta, build an outer
perimeter based on profit sharing of toll revenue collected
from wireless tags, and then watch the MARTA and highway
planning goofballs tear their hair. What kind of
organization actually plans 20 years down the road when
traffic jams are driving people bonkers today? A government
agency of course. Back to the communist aspects of this,
the central planners love the idea that everyone has the
same kind of transportation. How dare we express
individuality, or class distinction based on the kind of
car we drive.
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.
Governor Gray Davis of California has a few things to say
about this: namely, he’s all for it. In fact, having wrecked
havoc on California’s electric and utility companies through
price controls, he’s proposed confiscating them and giving
them to the state to run. Governor Davis, welcome to the
pantheon of fellow communist confiscators: Mao, Stalin,
and Castro.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment
of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Marx and Engels knew that growing food in a collective
commune would require some of the very productivity advances
brought about by capitalism and the industrial revolution
in order to supply anything above a subsistence level. The
solution for them was that everyone would work, and
agriculture would use industrial techniques. In this
analysis, they were correct: agriculture in the 21st
century is often referred to as agribusiness. It looks a lot
more like steel refining than the picturesque farmer of yore,
tilling his fields behind an ox, or the post Great
Depression family farmer on his tractor. Hurray for it.
Getting food was the daily occupation for most of humanity
for as long as we’ve been on this planet. In 1800, it’s
estimated that 80% of the American workforce was involved
in farming. In 1990, it’s estimated that 3% of the American
workforce was involved in farming. 3% of the population
provides food for the other 97%, of their own free will,
without hoarding, price fixing, or the other bugga-bears
of the free market.
The modern form of the industrial army is undeniably the
union. Just like an army, unions use force to get their way.
Sometimes its physical force, other times political force.
I fully support the freedom of and freedom from association.
If a group of workers wants to form a club and bargain
collectively, so be it. If their employer wants to fire
them all together, well, that’s fine too. Naturally, the
unions, consisting of the democratic mob, have passed
legislation making it legal for them to organize, but
illegal for their employer to terminate them. Forward the
communist army!
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing
industries; gradual abolition of all the
distinction between town and country by a
more equable distribution of the populace
over the country.
The original aim of this communist policy seems to be melding
the oppressor and oppressed classes: a mass of proletariat
concentrated in the city, a countryside of peasant farmers,
and a few aristocracy with massive tracts of hereditary land.
Notice the reference to "equable distribution" of the populace.
This can only be accomplished by land redistribution. The
communists saw the distinction between city dwellers, townies,
and country folk. They knew the city, filled with factory
workers, was their natural base from which to mount an
assault on the property rights conscious farmers and
aristocratic landowners. While moving people into the
countryside seems antithetical to today’s environmental
movement, the two are actually after the same goal: reduction
of property rights. The greens realize the communist goal by
forcing the people out of the country, and into the city and
suburbs. Think Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in reverse. Thus,
the common thread in these nihilistic, authoritarian
political movements is revealed.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.
Abolition of children's factory labor in its present
form. Combination of education with industrial
production, etc.
Well, we’ve certainly reached the education camp ideal
espoused in the communist manifesto. Instead of universal
access to "free" education, we now have universal compulsory
indoctrination. Look at the assault on home-schoolers for
further proof. I asked a friend of mine who recently graduated
with an education degree what she learned in her degree major
classes. The response frightened me; she had learned how to
control classroom behavior. She told me it usually "takes 3
or 4 years before children are broken in to the idea of a
teacher in charge". She teaches 2nd graders. Stories of
public school officials promoting political agendas are
legion. Almost universally, that agenda takes its cues
from the communist manifesto, and its modern keepers.
Back to point 10 of the Manifesto. The combination of
education with industrial production looks exactly like
the work to school programs that find such favor with our
public education system. The abolition of factory slave
labor, and the preservation of third world "habitat" are
two verses in the same tribal chant of the neo-communist
environmental movement. This is all in the name of
preventing the third world country de jour in cahoots with
Nike from wrecking the natural habitat of their beautiful
swamps and deserts while exploiting the children, of course.
The natural consequence that the now unemployed children
will have to beg or prostitute themselves to stay fed is
ignored by our enlightened watermelon (red with a thin
green skin) protestors.
Conclusion
Am I suggesting some massive conspiracy to infiltrate the
Democrat (and to a lesser degree the Republican) Party by
the International Commune? No. What I am suggesting is
that communists gravitate towards political parties that
see no wrong in enforcing edicts via state control. I am
also suggesting that people with authoritarian tendencies
will never come out and directly say that they want to run
your life. They’ll tell you to support some piece of
legislation in the name of fairness, or the environment,
or safety, or the children, or "our" future, or humanitarian
intervention, or national security. Those who oppose are
branded heartless, or selfish, or sadistic, or cowardly, or
stupid, or greedy. The collectivists make the claim to the
moral high ground based on the false assumption that they
know what’s best for someone else, and how dare you get in
the way. The worst part may be the fact that most Americans
don’t realize the stated goals of communism, and the means
to achieve those goals are at work in our society today. I
suppose most people assume the communists will come out and
say they want to run your life. No one can be enslaved all
at once; no one would volunteer for it. But the incremental
approach to control is insidious, and dishonest. It doesn’t
speak its name, since detection would render people alert to
it, and ready to destroy it. Well, folks, here’s your wakeup
call. You will know the authoritarians are attempting to gain
control by reading their Manifesto in their own words. It’s
plain as day if you take the time to read it.
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