[BenLurkin]

The would would be a better place today if Karl Marx was strangled in his crib.

[donna]

Balint Vazsonyi, 10-02-02

Over the past few years, it seems, everybody and his brother speaks about the capitalist system in America. Before, using the word was the hallmark of marxist training or influence. Yet lately, everybody is using the word - regardless of political leaning.

It bothers me because capitalism - the word and the concept - was the brainchild of Karl Marx. As well as offering an “-ism” opposite his own -ism, it describes a rigid class society in which one class possesses the means of production, the other nothing except its labor. The latter class is called “The Proletariat” who, as Lenin declared, can lose nothing but its chains when it rises against the oppressor.

This is not the place to argue whether capitalism was the appropriate way to describe certain European societies. The point is that owning things has always been open to Americans. The moment you buy one share of stock, you part-own “means of production,” not to mention owning your home and arriving at your place of work in your own automobile - a very American image.

America never had a proletariat.

http://balintvazsonyi.org/shns/shns100202.html

[dsc]

“who is worth celebrating, 200 years later?”

Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson. And, as an object lesson, Auty Custer.

[fella]

One freed slaves

The other enslaved entire nations.

[Stevenc131]

Douglass was a pro-gun Republican, so I’ll go with him. He said freedom rested in the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box.

[Zionist Conspirator]

It is rather more surprising — indeed it is jarring — to learn that Carnegie Mellon University, a school established and sustained to this day by exemplars of American capitalism, would choose to mount a year-long celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.

Not necessarily. There has always been that segment of the right that sees the left as merely a front for the "malefactors of great wealth" (ie, "David Rockefeller rules the world"). Ironically, today's right wing rogues gallery is essentially the same as that of the nineteenth century Populists (who were socialists, btw).

[Albion Wilde]

Maryland ping

[WayneS]

Frederick Douglass would have destroyed Karl Marx in a one-on-one debate.

He was a courageous, thoughtful and intelligent man who actually put his life on the line for his beliefs.

Karl Marx was a bad philosopher with second-rate mind who never had the guts to test his own third-rate “theories”