Thanksgiving Thoughts On Marxist America | Transterrestrial Musings

We have lost the balance:

Here’s what Marx said:

“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, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”

Think about what this means. All of the money and power would be focused in the state, but then the state would not do anything with that concentration of power. The state was innocent. There would be no cronyism, no corruption, no bureaucracy, and no concentration of stupidity so as to make mistakes much bigger.

This is precisely — without the proletarian aspects — the Obama worldview. Good citizens with high levels of education will be the philosopher kings, telling everyone what to eat, drive, and do for their own good. Naturally, these people would have no interests of their own. Naturally, their learning from books and theories rather than from real life would not lead them into really big mistakes.

And naturally this system will make the economy grow (“increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible”) rather than collapse because the people running the state know nothing about creating jobs or meeting a payroll or actually producing anything.

Then, there is Marx’s view of what later became known as the withering away of the state:

“When…all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. … If the proletariat…makes itself the ruling class…then it will…thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

What we have here today is not the triumph of the proletariat but the triumph of the managerial-bureaucratic-intellectual-cultural elite. The best describer of this is not Marx but James Burnham, a former Marxist whose writings in the 1940s were the basis for George Orwell in writing 1984. Then there is Karl Popper, who pointed out that the greatest threat to freedom (the “open society”) were those who thought they knew everything.

And those who seek political power, with few if any exceptions, are people set on accumulating power, glory, and wealth. All the more reason to limit what they can do.

Nevertheless, this grasping elite views itself as disinterested. It does not act from selfish motives but because it knows better than anyone else how to promote the public good. And even with the best will and highest morality that mortals are capable of achieving, political leaders and bureaucrats are still limited by their own worldview, life experience, and specific role (where you stand is where you sit, as one popular Washington, D.C., maxim has it).

There’s nothing here that would surprise America’s founders, who knew that freedom always depended on restraining such people.

Let’s hope we’re not too far gone.

9 thoughts on “Thanksgiving Thoughts On Marxist America”

That’s positively eerie. I bipped in here just after reading an online edition of Jan Kozak’s “And Not a Shot Was Fired.” He details the means the Hungarian Communists/Socialists employed in overthrowing their country’s government post-WWII. There are more similarities between their methods and the progressives’ than I care to think about.

Comparing the events of today to past history is useful but a tricky proposition. That one makes oneself aware of past history is rare and laudable. But as I say it is tricky; I’m finishing Iran Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. I wanted to know several things such as,how did his mind get twisted? how did the German society accept such (in hindsight) craziness? etc. I recommend the book.

But my point is that in reading that book, I can see many commonalities between then and now. Most notably “Never let a crisis go to waste”.

It’s an old trick.

Still even though the present regime uses many of the same tricks, it doesn’t mean they are crazed nutrolls and it doesn’t mean the nation will slip into horrid fascism. Hitler made id through persistence and a LOT of luck. The people were prepped for him by circumstances.

As to the Occu-flops, lefties and liberals who decry the existence of the rich, they should be directed to David Hannan’s blog – one of the best statements of the Conservative position:

<a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100119741/memo-to-the-occupy-protesters-here-are-ten-things-we-evil-capitalists-really-think/" title="Memo to the Occupy protesters: here are ten things we evil capitalists really think"

Karl Hallowell says:

November 26, 2011 at 12:33 PM

Still even though the present regime uses many of the same tricks, it doesn’t mean they are crazed nutrolls and it doesn’t mean the nation will slip into horrid fascism. Hitler made id through persistence and a LOT of luck. The people were prepped for him by circumstances.

So it makes sense that we shouldn’t create circumstances in which fascism or other such ideologies can fester. That’s what I see the real danger of the current administration. They’re too incompetent to take over, but not to pave the way for someone down the road.
1. Joe Triscari says:
  
  November 26, 2011 at 2:07 PM
  
  Yep. The Roman Republic didn’t end because Caesar took over. It ended when he took over. It ended because Augustus learned from Caesar who learned from Sulla and Gaius who took a lesson from the Grachi.
  
  And all of them chipped away at the traditions and laws that kept the Republic in place for 400 years.
  1. B Lewis says:
    
    November 26, 2011 at 7:42 PM
    
    To be fair, Augustus’ imperial rule wasn’t a bad thing overall. It was (as Virgil called it) Rome’s Saturnia regna, its golden age, a time when “a new breed of men sent down from high Heaven” took control of a divided people and forged the Pax Romana.
    
    In any case, the Republic’s moment was past by the time Octavian rose to the purple. Representative government only really works at the level of the agora, the Roman civis — the community of shared culture and values. At larger scales: no shared values, no shared culture, no civitas — and thus no res publica. A multicultural, highly diverse, and territorially-extended political entity such as Rome c. 27 BC simply cannot be effectively ruled by any form of republican government, for it is no longer a republic. Such an entity may maintain the trappings of a republic, but it is in fact a top-down, centralized, autocratic state, as Rome had under the Julians.
    
    And as we have today.