Posted on 05/08/2012 2:09:04 PM PDT by Art in Idaho
Between things like Anita Dunn’s professed love for Mao Tse-Tung and the not-controversy surrounding the president’s new campaign slogan (“Forward!”), we suspect White House staffers are getting awfully tired of responding to questions about whether the Obama administration employs at least a few communist-sympathizing officials.
Rick Bookstaber, who currently serves on President Obama’s Financial Stability Oversight Council, may have just kicked off another round of these questions.
Writing on his personal blog Monday, Boosktaber posted a refutation of conservative author Tucker Carlson’s claim that, by repeatedly singling out the “wealthy,” Democrats are waging “class warfare.”
“There is little that matches the artfulness of the rich in waving off criticism of the widening income gap as ‘class warfare,’” Bookstaber writes. “And there is little that matches the gullibility of the rest in following along.”
“I am not picking sides in this war,” he added, “but I believe such a war is justifiable, and indeed ultimately inevitable.”
Bookstaber continued:
During the industrial revolution class warfare centered on the length of the working day. A tightly defined working day only appeared with the advent of the industrial revolution. Before then laborers worked when they needed money, and then quit for a time once they fulfilled their needs. But regimentation and a dependable workforce became necessary once there was machinery to run and capital invested, and so with industrialization came the an enforced workday. So it is not surprising that Marx stated the central battle of class warfare at the time in terms of the working day:
The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the laborer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class. – Marx, Das Kapital
Karl Marx, of course, is most famously known as the father of communism. His political philosophy was adopted and implemented by infamous dictators — including Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Min, Fidel Castro, and Che Gueverra — whose search for the perfect collectivist society led to the deaths of approximately 100 million people, according to the historian Stéphane Courtois.
Another wonderful product of 20+ years of American education. Tell that to the pre-industrial farm workers who worked from dawn till dusk during the planting and harvesting seasons.
...and tell me again why so many FR-conservative-Romney haters will not be voting? To protect their principles? RINO or whatever else you hate about him, Romney would not be surrounded by commies and socialists.
“When I think We the Taxpayers are paying the salaries of all these Marxists, I just cringe.”
####
Well then don’t go near your nearest University either, then.
The more “elite”, the greater the thieving pathology.
True. Moreover pre-industrial craftsmen didn’t stop working once their “needs were met”. They kept working to make extra to save and invest, and hopefully pass on to their children, something Marxists hate.
That is just foolish to not vote.
The question remains, will the Romney campaign have the guts to call them Communist?
And would viable charges of being Communist still have any impact with the sheeple?
Rick Bookstaber
Voting for someone with no chance to win is just a way to not make an unpleasant choice while feeling good about yourself. The only way your vote can make any difference is if Obama squeaks by in a close one. Just ask FL Ralph Nader voters.
Marx begins with an acknowledgement of the perception of rights on the part of both the capitalist and the laborer, but then argues that the question of the length of the working day cannot be solved by an appeal to rights, but only through class struggle, wherein “force” decides between “equal rights”. (Force can mean physical force, but can also mean the force of the political process).
The central point is that there is no way that this question of the working day or any number of other social questions, though posed as rights by the groups in conflict, can be resolved without being reformulated in terms of class struggle or class warfare. Unlike civil rights – the rights which our society regards as inalienable – it is difficult to do much more than simply take sides when it comes to economic rights, because what we call economic rights are really nothing more than the bargaining in an exchange between those providing labor and those providing capital, those creating jobs and those taking the jobs, or whatever. There is class warfare because the social and economic pie has to be split, and there is no objective way to do so. The war can be active or passive, the sides can have a truce, one side can temporarily be resigned to its lot or be held in check through force, but the conflict never ends. A change in generations or in social consciousness, and things will flare up again. There are some areas of fairness in the civil sphere – freedom from slavery, torture and piracy – but what are the rights inherent for a particular term of exchange between the parties in a trade?
totally looks the part of a blowhard stooge.
They just don’t even care anymore to hide it. They just hope that the conservatives hate Mitt too much to vote for him and the rest don’t know who Karl Marx is.
Backstabber would be a better name — he’s backstabbing the United States of America.
But I'm not voting for Romney....
“’There is little that matches the artfulness of the rich in waving off criticism of the widening income gap as “class warfare,”’ Bookstaber writes. ‘And there is little that matches the gullibility of the rest in following along.’
‘I am not picking sides in this war,’ he added, ‘but I believe such a war is justifiable, and indeed ultimately inevitable.’”
So there is a war. Why, then, the scare quotes, and why the suggestion that it’s rich people’s “artfulness” to claim there’s a class war? Ah, I see, it must be the waving off part. The rich have been successful at defining “class warfare” so as to be something that’s easily waved off. And so it is; not because it’s frivolous—though it can be—but because everyone knows how bad it is and to what bad places it leads.
Also, forget about Marx. Forget about how you could possibly not pick sides when you say class warfare is “justifiable” (how would it be justifiable if the rich were to win? Wouldn’t they be in the same place they were when the war began?) It’s impossible to swallow his claim of not picking sides when he starts by chiding the rich.
They had to publish a whole magazine issue to unite the M-L-Ms with the M-Ls? Gosh, I love leftist infighting.
POTT! (Post of the thread)
You forget that Marxists care not about what is, but what fits their “science.” They cannot even admit that one farmer saved anything whatsoever, for the implications that would have for the formation of capital. Capital has to be stolen, and profits derived therefrom expropriated. We can’t have any such thing as people who are not feudal lords or, what is the same thing, capitalist pigs retaining more than they need that second, or what isn’t redistributed to the community on the basis of need.
It’s gotta all be, between ancient communism and the proletarian millenium to come, those producing either making only what they6 need that second or having it stolen by their evil, greedy, material-bound overseers.
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