Posted on 05/08/2018 9:35:16 AM PDT by MtnClimber
So here we are at the bicentennial of the birth of Karl Marx in Trier, an ancient city that was once the capital of the Franks. Chuck was another of your Cinco de Mayo babies. Let us celebrate the man who was fated to outdo Helen of Troy, the beauty that launched a thousand ships. Marx launched a million killers to help solve the overpopulation problem that so obsesses our lefty friends. But let us remind the world that this fearless prognosticator was stunningly wrong on just about everything, and let us count the ways, so you can rag on your lefty friends whenever the mood takes you. The story of the last 200 years has been one that Jonah Goldberg calls “The Miracle” and Deirdre McCloskey and I call the Great Enrichment. But back in 1818 when Marx was born, and in 1848 when the First Activist issued his Communist Manifesto, nobody knew that the Western world was on its way to an all-fronts upswing that would transform the lives, most particularly, of the poor and weak. No Chuck, the bourgeoisie is not like the feudal lords. In the Communist Manifesto Marx naively assumed that the rising bourgeoisie would become a ruling class just like the feudal lords of old, exploiting and oppressing the rubes as the mood took them. That is why lefties ever since have been crouched in their lefty bunkers scanning the horizon looking the capitalist tanks making their breakout. But Marx got it wrong. The capitalists are just interested in dominating the market; they want to flood the world with products, not with soldiers. See, unlike all ruling classes down the ages, the capitalists, and the middle class are not that interested in political power. This is incomprehensible to graduates of Activism 101.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The left seems to be getting crazier every year.
The concepts of socialism and communism were around long before Marx. Marx made socialism a religious faith, as something historically inevitable. After Marx, socialism would be the inevitable Messiah that would bring personal and international well-being and harmony, and would be worth bringing about by whatever means necessary.
I may be ignorant and I know I’m missing something.
But, who decided to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth? I read a few articles which praise Marx as a great philosophical mind, etc.
Nothing has been said of how communism has resulted in tens of millions slaughtered. Nothing said about how Marx inspired these communists to slaughter people in pursuit of their goals.
What does he think kept the bankers out of jail when they lied, cheated and stole?
Money has a political power all its own. Once you have money, you need to have political power to be allowed to keep it. Doesn't matter what the form of government, somebody wants to take it from you, and you need power to keep it. Or to steal the other guys.
power can come from the barrel of a gun, but up until that point, it seems to be easiest to find it in a huge bank balance.
Maybe he's confused as the small guy knows he's never going to have political power, so avoids the struggle for it. Corporations don't (much) go for the overt vote getting as it antagonizes one or another segment of their market, but rather buys politicians directly which works no matter what party runs things.
Well, then, how about this?
You can't make an omelet.....
Yep. Communism is just feudalism in a new dress. In fact not even the dress changed that much.
“Chuck” could have, and should have, heededSOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.Socialism of any stripe makes the mistake Paine rebuts above. Socialists are cynical about society, and about the leaders in society called employers. The sovereign remedy for “problems” which exist in society - so goes socialist theory - is government. Paine’s objection to that critique would be that government is evil, and even if society is imperfect, society is good. Socialism thus is cynical about society and naive about government.Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . . .
security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. - Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
Cynical socialists can criticize their fool heads off, but
- From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sarbonne:
- There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
“Corporations don’t (much) go for the overt vote getting as it antagonizes one or another segment of their market,”
That’s changed significantly recently as more and more companies go out of their way to take political positions, often coerced by political activists in and out of the companies.
And politicians have learned to control recalcitrant companies through their regulatory powers.
The system is becoming more fascist.
Richard Wurmbrand did years of research on Karl Marx and wrote a book entitled, “Was Marx a Satanist?” His thesis was that “Socialism” was Marx’s Faustian bargain. He believed that Marx was a closet Satanist who was given Fame and Notoriety if he would further the cause of Satan, world wide Socialism. Remember, Satan is a Humanist.
Marx should have asked for an escape from his poverty and relief from the boils on his butt that made him unable to sit for years!
bmp
Marx's exploitation theory consists of invalid conclusions and makes wrong predictions. It is wrong about:
1) the existence of the dialectic process
2) metaphysical materialism
3) its abstract conceptual framework
4) its absolute labor theory of value
5) its theory of prices
6) its theory of profit (surplus value)
7) its iron law of wages
8) doctrine of progressive impoverishment.
When the absurdities of the exploitation theory are fully understood, it will be clear that never before in all of human history has a greater bunch of pompous ignoramuses with pretensions to knowledge behaved more destructively and self-destructively - made themselves more a spectacle of downright fools meriting the utter contempt of all mankind - than have the marxist intellectuals of the last four or five generations. Their lack of genuine knowledge will be seen to be surpassed only by their lack of genuine intellect.
Don’t forget his laughable Labor Theory of Capital. It took a book as thick as Das Kapital to catalog so many idiotic ideas.
But at their core Marxists are the greatest of mass murderers.
All of the globalists Bush league free trader Republicans don’t even know they are pushing the Marxist agenda.
Karl Marx was a Lutheran. His father was a member of the Evangelical Church of Prussia (state approved church). Many of their fellows in religion leaned to the left, just as many do today.
He was baptized in the Lutheran church as a boy of six or so, at his parents behest.
He was not a practicing Lutheran as an adult according to anything I have ever read, and was not a devout Christian according to anything he wrote or did.
I tend to look at what a culture produces. An examination of my own religious/social culture quite a few years ago found it to be in decline. Some of us realize what’s going on around us and look for a more original philosophy for ourselves and our people.
For example, where were my main ancestors about 3,000 years ago. “Anatolia,” perhaps? And where before that? And what did they really believe in? Did we perhaps assume a foreign culture sometime in the interim?
And what should we do? Are we really monotheistic, or do vestiges of polytheism (idolatry) remain?
Are we really Romans or Greeks? And their writings a little before and after the year, 1. Was the information disseminated by them true? And what about the councils that decided the fabrication of a religion?
Those are the questions that I sought to find answers for, even if the truth were to turn out to be scary.
Why? Because our culture is in decline, and it’s not really ours.
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