November 1989, Moscow
During the Polish anti-Communist revolt, spearheaded by the workers, a joke swept through Poland. According to the story, the Communist dictator couldn’t figure out what to do in order to put down the uprising. So he went to Moscow to visit Lenin’s tomb for inspiration, and the Soviet authorities closed it down to let him meditate there.
“Oh, Lenin,” said President Wojciech Jaruzelski, the situation is terrible. “The country is in turmoil, the economy is collapsing, counterrevolutionaries are everywhere, the imperialists are subverting Poland, and the church is backing the revolt. What should I do?”
Suddenly, Lenin, mummified as he was, came to life, sat up, and shouted: “Arm the workers!”
November 2011, New York City
The bear-like man with wild hair and long beard waddled down the lower Manhattan street. That “old mole,” revolution, had stuck its head up into the air again, sniffed the carbon dioxide-laden firmament, and didn’t scurry back down into the hole. A specter was haunting the world all right.
He was excited to see it first-hand. But the sight was a shock. This was no organized group of class-conscious proletarians, but the flotsam of bourgeois society. Drug users and sex fiends, spoiled brats from the upper bourgeoisie, and anarchists.
He had written about:
“The social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”
Perhaps his first impression was misleading or perhaps this movement was indeed a tool of reactionary intrigue. He must investigate further.
Marx takes aside a young man. He notes the fellow is altogether scraggly, dressed in tattered clothes, unbathed and unshaven. No doubt he is starving, having been cast aside by the factory where he was hitherto overworked and underpaid. With his keen eye, Marx notes he is wearing some kind of canvas shoes, not even being able to afford leather ones! On all of his clothes are small logos. How disgusting, Marx thinks, he must bear the free advertising of giant corporations or go naked!
“Excuse me,” says Marx, “have you been thrown out of your 12-hour a day factory job due to over-production? Is that why you are here?”
“No. I have $150,000 in college loans to get my degree in conflict resolution and I don’t want to pay it back.”
Marx was puzzled: “But then you took a factory job as a wage slave to support yourself?”
“No,” was the reply. “I’m waiting for a job resolving international conflicts. Until then, I’m living in my parents’ mansion.” There was a strange musical sound. “Sorry, dude, can’t talk to you right now. My smart phone is ringing.” The young man presses a button on the strange device and speaks into it: “Hey! Did you get the email I sent you from my computer? What? Oh, sorry, it must have been from my iPad II. Speak louder, I can’t hear you because my MP3 player is on too loud!”
Marx was astounded. As he wandered around the make-shift camp, he saw support for many strange causes and reflected about what he’d written in “The Communist Manifesto”:
“Economists, philanthropists, humanitarians … reformers of every imaginable kind,” who never really understood society.
The more he walked around, the more suspicious Marx became. This supposed revolutionary protest was being supported by the government and financed by speculators like George Soros. That same government was subsidizing big corporations that made large donations to its election.
He must look further into these issues. So he rented a car and drove on and on, from California to the New York island; from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. And as he drove down that ribbon of highway, here’s what he didn’t see:
– “All the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.” Yet the working people had the strongest and most loving families.
– “The bourgeoisie … has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest. … It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor … in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Yet the people have not become so depraved. They’re still clinging.
– “Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. … Slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine … and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.” Yet such nineteenth-century conditions have nothing to do with contemporary life.
– “The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious.” Yet progress has brought higher living standards.
– “The proletarian is without property. … Subjection to capital … has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion are to him so many bourgeois prejudices.” Yet all of these things survive.
– Freedom in such a society merely means “free trade, free selling and buying.” Yet the people treasured freedom.
– “Those who acquire anything, do not work.” Yet such people worked very hard.
– “The workers have no country.” Yet the people loved their country.
Wonderful, now put this essay in a flyer and hand it out at OWS demos. At the very least we’ll find out if any of those socialist heroes can read.
The true bane of socialism/communism is that its members cannot recognize it as such. They must employ ever new and fanciful euphemisms to identify their neurosis. Therefore, they would never understand the irony of reading such a flyer.
Truly great satire, acute, pungent and funny. You realize of course that tomorrow’s headlines in the Malevolent Socialist Media will be gleeful? “Barry Rubin calls Tea Party Marxist.”
Accounting for the Tea Party, the OWS, and Tim Tebow
In the first part of a series titled, “What Sets the Tea Party Apart,” Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks asks, “What is the difference between OWS and the Tea Party?” a rhetorical question tantamount to asking the reader to distinguish a cesspool from a cathedral.
Kibbe might as well have inquired as to the difference between the Occupy Wall Streeters and Denver Broncos’ much maligned quarterback, Tim Tebow, who hasn’t publicly identified himself as a Tea Party member but who clearly shares their philosophy– and their condemnation.
The chief problem with the Tea Party and Tebow in the eyes of their detractors is that they represent everything their detractors are not. As for the OWS mobs, they should study up on the conservative movement and the conservative quarterback after, as Newt Gingrich suggested, they get a job and take a bath.
Many on the Left like to draw parallels between the anti-taxation Tea Partiers and the anti-everything Occupiers in a futile attempt to give a degree of credibility and civility to the latter. The two groups are as dissimilar as cleanliness and dirt.
Kibbe cites the 18th century English philosopher-economist Adam Smith in presenting his argument that the Tea Party is “set apart,” distinctive from other social movements by virtue of its commitment to what Kibbe describes with a single word, “accountability . . . the moral basis that binds a community, allows for cooperation, and enables human prosperity.”
I would add that the stark absence of a sense of accountability, compounded by an even more gross disinterest in civilized behavior, render the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations irrelevant except, of course, to the lives they have negatively impacted.
Adam Smith expressed that sentiment far more elegantly: “The most sacred laws of justice, therefore, those whose violation seems to call loudest for vengeance and punishment, are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbour; the next are those which guard his property and possessions.”
Though few are calling for “vengeance and punishment” for OWSers other than the enforcement of existing laws, the accountability factor is key to understanding the phenomenon of relatively small masses of people trampling on the rights of the vast majority.
Matt Kibbe sees the issue as the realization of a concept Tea Partiers genetically inherited from America’s Founders and Occupy Wall Street somehow missed: “Don’t hurt other people and don’t take their stuff.”
The Tea Party respects everyone and hurts no one.
The OWSers respect no one, hurt everyone including themselves and seize whatever “stuff” they can get their socialist, grubby hands on, from public park spaces to the rights of others to property and livelihoods while injuring those parks, those rights, properties, livelihoods, and themselves by their utter contempt for fundamental principles of personal and societal responsibility.
Tim Tebow’s principal responsibility on the football field is to win games for the Denver Broncos and, if he accidentally hurts anyone in the course of executing that duty, he would be contrite and apologetic since, well, that’s Tim Tebow.
He has admitted that he is also accountable to God, religion, and ethical dictates and that antiquated attitude toward morality rankles many in the sports world.
His critics have attacked Tebow’s athletic talents but what evidently bothers them most are other accountabilities. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=6358.)
berlet98 – This is excellent!!
So, Tebow has no problem breaking someone’s neck because he can just say he’s sorry?
Don’t put words in Tebow’s mouth. Sounds like you are projecting.
Yes, the Occupoopers and their organizers are a bunch of privileged posers who have enjoyed advantages that the rest of us can’t even dream of.
Soon after I finish this comment, I go to start my shift running a checkout stand. And I’m a good salesperson who is happy to have the job.
But I sure don’t want any more of MY tax dollars paying for Occupest antics.
We must charge #Occupy supporters and organizers for the costs of #Occupy!
I pray you don’t meet any of the “occupiers” in your workplace!
It was said of George Orwell that he was hated by both the left and the right. He was hated by one because he understood them and by the other because they understood him.
Barry, if you find yourself catching flak from both sides, you’ll know that you’re right where you need to be. Struck pigeons scatter.
All the best–
Mark Holland
Salt Lake City, UT
Wonderful article. It truly shows that today’s leftists have never read Marx or any communist theory.
Thank you for the laugh.
An excellent column, that should be read in every school and college.
It will, when we roll back the regime.
Personally I don’t believe Karl Marx was mistaken; I believe he knew full well that the so-called proletariat class was the lazy, non-working, tax-eating, government-dependent class – and a lazy somewhat-laboring, benefit-receiving class (government labor unions) – all along. Marx wanted an all-powerful (Marxist) government to support the government-connected proletariat class at the expense of the laboring, tax-paying, non-government-connected middle class – class struggle with an all-powerful, self-serving referee in cahoots with the proletariat – one-sided class struggle. Marx made no bones about it – he intended to destroy the laboring middle class – what better way to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat” – code for dictatorship of the Marxist ruling class. Marx saw the vulnerability of “democracy” because when enough of the laboring middle class (under the burden of slavery to the Marxist ruling class and the proletariat class) gave up (Atlas shrugging) – when enough went over to the proletariat side – there would eventually be insufficient labor to maintain adequate food and a peaceful social order – anarchy would ensue – and a Marxist Dictatorship would “come to the rescue.”
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [self-serving Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property. You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the [non] working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Karl Marx couldn’t visit OWS anyway, he was from a Jewish (converted to Christianity) family, they would lynch him.
Actually our US President has the Karol Marx ideology and when he was campaigning did mention he want to share the assets of rich people to entire nation and there is no doubt with his ideology he did encourages the people who wants to be on welfares and wants to live free on account of hard respectful workers but fortunately the nation is smart enough and will not surrender the country to bunch of lazy people .
Marx was the first adherent of political correctness which I define as a monstrous form of politeness designed to explain away and indeed do away with the concept of failure by unsuccessful groups and individuals which see themselves as disenfranchised. In it stead, they are merely unlucky and exploited rocket scientists.
No coincidence then that the Democratic Party is the home of thinly veiled Marxism which posits that one’s social standing trumps one’s individual talents, discipline and value system.
No coincidence that the Democratic Party is the home of the Rainbow Coalition, which could also named “Unlucky, Oppressed, Exploited, Failures.”
No coincidence that conspicuous success is always the target of the Left unless of course you are Michael Moore or Al Gore. In that case you get a special dispensation because you are a worthy messenger that has confessed their own sins, sins by race, by culture, by world view, by economic status.
No coincidence that the Democratic Left dispenses morality according to economic status and record of failure.
America was founded on pragmatic rationalism which embraced and recognized simple realities of the human condition. Our Constitution is not an ideology but a document to avert and enable our natural and “self-evident” natures. We have turned our back on reality in order to make women, gays, blacks, hispanics and Muslims feel good about themselves and explain away failure.
This is why President Obama tried to use NASA to reach out to Muslims in a manner they could not do for themselves. This is why gay marriage is meant to acquire the same status as real couples who bear real children. This is why affirmative action, based on cheap psychology, ignores the creation of Israel in only 3 years after a thousand years and more of pogroms and murder in Europe in favor of a mindless paradigm that stipulate generation of post-slavery hangover.
America is one big apology for the nature of reality itself and any culture that turns its back on reality is effectively insane. Just look at the rubbish heap that has comprised the old Soviet Union and Cuba. Look at the insanity of Nazi Germany, where they tried to gerrymander reality itself to create villains and excuses for failure where none existed. No coincidence it resulted in the most heinous act in terms of space and time ever.
Our President is running an insane asylum from a world view that exists no where in this world. Obama is a walking excuse for failure from everything to the Mughals of the East India Company to the depraved values of black American youth.
So, basically what you’re saying is that American should get rid of all of its minorities and women because they can never achieve what the white man can?
Where in the world did you find the racism in this comment. It must be ingrained in you subconscious.
No, learn to read; he is advocating an end to feel good politically correct subsidies that ignore reality, bankrupt the nation and amount to little more than reverse institutionalized bigotry.
Here is a simple test question about equality, real equality. What percentage of wounded in Vet’s Hospitals across America are women? Dress that one up in any language you want. It’s a hard truth “feminists” ignore.
Multiply that 1,000 times across many sectors of American society and you have madness. You can’t keep a good man down and those who CAN do a thing DO do a thing and those who can’t subscribe to the excuse making machine called Marxist/Socialist political correctness.
OMG I just saw the new Hangover movie. It is great! My best friend already downloaded the whole movie. I’m gonna go watch it again.
An excellent post—as usual. Kudos, too, to Berlet98. Very little to add, except a few thoughts that like-minded readers might agree with: Our progressive cum socialist cum uber-liberal friends who love nothing so much as to cozy up with rabidly reactionary Islamists and rationalize their contempt for all things rational truly live in an Alice-in-Wonderland world. Unfortunately, they are also dragging everyone else down with them. If only we could find a way to separate from them and throw away the key after locking them down there for good…
Nice work Mr. Rubin.
Marx: “My god they used me, they abused me and they misunderstood me”
Join the club Karl! You should have seen it coming.
Sincerely,
Jesus
Bravo! Encore! Fantastic.
Critical distinction:
1) Tea Party = US Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights.
2) OWS = Karl Marx/Lenin. Das Kapital.
Number 1): Freedom, We The People, Life, Liberty, unfettered freedom, i.e., capitalism (market driven economy).
Number 2): Domination of a populace by a cadre of like minded individuals exerting absolute control over Life, Liberty and unfettered freedom, i.e., socialism (command, top down economy).
Most nations (of the 197 registered in the UN) display some form of Number 2 and none of Number 1.
Only one nation, of all 197 registered with the UN, STILL display a great deal of Number 1, but having a propensity to increase the presence of Number 2.
Ergo, Francis Fox Piven (of Cloward-Piven fame), Saul Alinsky, Van Jones et al.
Vote 2012 for as witnessed thus far, massive fraud as never before seen in US elections is active and present. God Bless America.
In his desire to smear the occupy movement, Barry Rubin shows that he might have read the standard stuff from the Communist Manifesto, but he’s obviously never touched _Capital_, and certainly not Volume III. Here’s a choice Marx quote.
“The credit system, which has its focal point in the allegedly national banks and the big-money lenders and usurers that surround them, is one enormous centralization and gives this class of parasites a fabulous power not only to decimate the industrial capitalists periodically but also to interfere in actual production in the most dangerous manner — and this crew know nothing of production and have nothing at all to do with it.”
Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III
Have you ever thought about publishing an ebook or guest authoring on other sites? I have a blog based on the same subjects you discuss and would love to have you share some stories/information. I know my readers would enjoy your work. If you’re even remotely interested, feel free to send me an e mail.
That’s a really naive way of looking at things. If we expanded that thinking to a national level then our entire nation would require a national Emergency Manager. That’s what Hitler was, btw.
As Pink Floyd aptly noted, there are always “Pigs on the Wing”. What Pink Floyd failed to note is that Communist Pigs are no better than Capitalist ones. The album, “Animals”, which I will play on my radio show this afternoon with commentary, was based on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Which, in turn, was based on Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”.
“The first chapter of the Manifesto, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, examines the Marxist conception of history, with the initial idea asserting that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. It goes on to say that in capitalism, the working class, proletariat, are fighting in the class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the bourgeois, and that past class struggle ended either with revolution that restructured society, or “common ruin of the contending classes”.
It continues by adding that the bourgeois exploits the proletariat by “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones”.
The Manifesto explains that the reason the bourgeois exist and exploit the proletariat with low wages is because of private property, “the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital”, and that competition amongst the proletariat creates wage-labour, which rests entirely on the competition among the workers!
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