| Adam Smith and Karl Marx by Great Orion Voyager © 2009 thorkorps Communism is a proven failure: Communist China exploits and oppresses workers more than any other nation. Chinese Communist Party officials are a ruling bourgeoisie business class that exploits the public as industrial slaves. Communism failed throughout the Soviet Union. North Korea is a disaster. Vietnam is abandoning Marxism. Cuba may abandon Marxism after Castro. Everywhere, Marx would have to admit, communism failed. Capitalism is a proven failure: The Great Depression proved it. Adam Smith and Karl Marx predicted the Great Depression as the natural result of an unregulated free market. Smith and Marx predicted today’s recessions, jobless recoveries, imperialism and multinational corporations run amok. Capitalists play this game to make a killing. Capitalists are the worst enemies of Public Interest. Karl Marx was RIGHT in his criticism of capitalism but WRONG in his communist solution: He wanted to eliminate private property, allow a Central Committee to oppress the public, forbid elections, and invade privacy. His anarchist friend Bakunin knew the Central Committee would devolve into totalitarian dictatorship. Bakunin was right in his criticism of Marxism but wrong in his Anarchist solution. IT IS TIME FOR AMERICAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: Social Democracy accepts the capitalist free market yet admits capitalists cannot be trusted: Public Interest requires stewardship from public agencies. Social Democracy is strong progressive tax, strong regulation of corporations, strong stewardship of ecosystems and social infrastructure, prevention of tax shelters and prevention of campaign finance corruption. Millionaires must be placed into higher progressive tax brackets so that the more money they earn, the more society will benefit. All tax shelters must be shut down. Social Democracy brings high quality of life for everyone. Britain, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, Europe and South America enjoy Social Democracy, even as America is stuck in a Dark Age: America must catch up with the rest of the world. ADAM SMITH Modern capitalism was described by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) in his 1776 masterpiece, AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. Capitalism is based on the Multiplier Effect: One hundred workers can work more efficiently through specialization than can one worker alone. The more workers, the more efficiency, the more units produced, the more units sold, the more profit. THE WEALTH OF NATIONS described capitalism using Smith’s parable of the pin factory: Smith toured a factory to analyze efficiency: If one man worked alone, he could barely produce one pin per day, but through division of labor, ten specialists could make 48,000 pins per day. With this shattering observation, Smith had given birth to the Industrial Revolution. To maximize profit, one should not build something and sell it alone. One should raise capital to pay hundreds of workers to make thousands of units. The more capital one can raise, the bigger operations it can fund, the greater return on investment. Since bigger companies with greater capital are more profitable, they ultimately dominate markets and drive out smaller competitors. This creates relentless market pressure favoring progressively bigger companies until only giant monopolies dominate markets: Monopolies leave a small minority incredibly wealthy. The rich get richer, since they have capital to invest, while the poor stagnate in poverty. Adam Smith warned capitalists want workers “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become.” Smith criticized the wealthy: “Civil government so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” PERFECT MARKETS LEAD TO PERFECT LIBERTY: Adam Smith wanted capitalism not to make the rich richer, but to bring higher quality of life to all citizens. He believed capitalism could do this because it was the most efficient generator of goods and services and opportunity: SELF-INTEREST PROMOTES PUBLIC INTEREST: Adam Smith firmly believed the capitalist free market works best when everyone works for self-interest, to make money and improve quality of life. THE WEALTH OF NATIONS was published in 1776 and became an instant bestseller, making Smith wealthy. But he gave away his wealth to charity, and died poor: Smith was not greedy for money. Noam Chomsky, 1998 “Go on to Adam Smith: He argued that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. Maybe the first real break with this is capitalist ideology. So after Ricardo, you start getting the conception that it’s better for the poor if I’m rich. As capitalist ideology becomes dominant, this conception, that you’ll only hurt the poor by helping them, takes over. So Malthus and Ricardo and others said that if you can’t survive by what you can gain on the marketplace, go somewhere else. And people fought against it. The British army was putting down riots in the 1820’s and 1830’s because people simply would not accept the fact that they had no right to live. And that goes way back to the Enclosure of the Commons: Look at what was called liberty in England: Liberty meant liberty for property, which meant taking away from people their traditional rights. The rights to the commons meant forests, pasturelands, grazing lands: With proprietary rights established, with liberty given to owners, that land was taken away from everyone else. Thereafter you had formal liberty, but popular deprivation, which proletarianized the British working class…. And we all recognize there’s something quite wrong with one person having superfluities and another person starving.” Adam Smith wrote THE WEALTH OF NATIONS in 1776, before the Industrial Revolution. He theorized that supply and demand of goods and labor could find a perfect equilibrium that would offer security for everyone. Karl Marx, writing in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, found this wasn’t true. Owners always wield greater bargaining power than laborers, because owners have all the money, and therefore all the power. Perfect markets do not lead to perfect equality. On the contrary, there are no perfect markets, only a series of booms and busts Marx would find intolerable. 1848 Karl Marx develops his doctrine during the Industrial Revolution when capitalists are running amok without regulations: 1840’s is a revolutionary decade that exceeds 1960’s in drama and bloodshed: Chartists riot for civil rights and farmers riot against oppressive Corn Laws in England. Irish and German Potato Famines kill millions. Civil war and riots erupt across Europe. In 1848, Sicily rebels against Italian royalty. Austria invades Italy. Rebels overthrow the Austrians. Liberal meetings are banned in France, so liberals riot. French King Louis Philippe abdicates and liberals seize Parliament. They form unions, establish a free press, give all men the vote, but at next election, conservatives shut down unions and the press. Louis Napoleon is installed as French President and begins another military dictatorship. Kaiser Wilhelm agrees to form Germany separate from Prussia, but gives Germans an Assembly without power. In Dresden composer Richard Wagner and Bakunin organize riots protesting Prussia. Protests are brutally crushed by Prussian soldiers. Wagner, Bakunin and Marx flee to exile in France and Switzerland. In Vienna rebels demand a new constitution. The new German Assembly supports Hungarian Independence from Austria. In response Austrians execute German Assemblymen. Rebels make great progress in 1848, but the rebellion is crushed in 1849. Austria invades Rome and Hungary while Prussia invades Germany. Soldiers charge riots and kill dissidents. German nationalists ask Kaiser Wilhelm to become President of Germany. In response Kaiser smashes Germans and re-establishes Prussia. The Victorian Era forces capitalists against workers throughout the world: American Yankee anti-slavery protests would be unable to end slavery until the Civil War. The British Empire crushes rebels in India, steals Hong Kong and crushes China in the Opium War. Britain, France, Austria and Prussia build armies to fight horrific battles in the Crimean War and Franco Prussian War. World War I in 1910’s caused the Russian Revolution and was built upon this warmongering in Marx’s era, when workers were dismissed as cannon fodder to be killed at the whim of aristocracy. Imperial Capitalism run amok guaranteed Marxist Revolution, and led Lenin to conclude: “Capitalism is Imperialism.” Imperialists caused the American Revolution, French Revolution, Russian Revolution and Chinese Revolution: Aristocrats who dismissed workers as cannon fodder certainly deserved to be overthrown, and yes, guillotined. In this era it is easy to understand why Marx concluded all work is slavery: Adam Smith’s concept that we work out of “Self-Interest” was lost on Marx. To Marx, anyone who felt any self-interest would quit his job. It doesn’t matter how much you get paid: If you return value to owners, you are perpetuating slavery which must be overthrown. KARL MARX Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Catholic Prussia to a Jewish lawyer who baptized his whole family including Karl as Lutherans. Marx would reject both Judaism and Christianity, insisting on pure Atheism. Marx lashed out against intellectual competitors, spewing racist insults especially at Jews, whom he called every racist slur. Marx was a raving Atheist Anti-Semite and Anti-Christian. With Jewish blood, German universities denied his admission; being Lutheran, he was alienated from Jews; after organizing riots in 1848, he was exiled from Europe; being penniless, he was alienated from his refuge in London; Queen Victoria denied his petition for citizenship. In A REQUIEM FOR KARL MARX, Frank Manuel points out that Marx suffered alienation throughout his life, being a stateless refugee. Alienation is key to understanding his hatred of capitalism: In Marx’s era and today, millions of workers produce goods and services far too expensive for them to afford, as Marx said, “the worker is alienated from his own product.” In MARX WITHOUT MYTH, Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale record that Marx graduated University of Jena with a degree in philosophy in 1841 at age 23, strongly influenced by the atheist Hegel. As editor of small literary journals he lived in Germany and France until 1844 at age 26, when he became a professional revolutionary. He renounced Prussian citizenship and after organizing riots of 1848, he remained a stateless refugee. His wife Jenny suffered horribly: As an 1848 refugee she had to raise four babies and toddlers with no money, no clothes and no food, being evicted out of a dozen apartments for failure to pay rent, being chased by creditors all over Europe, some of whom confiscated the children’s clothes and baby blankets in winter. Jenny was thrown into debtor’s prison. Two babies died. She caught smallpox and almost died. At one point their debt was so extreme Karl had to pawn his own coat and all his children’s shoes in the middle of winter. Two sons died miserably of preventable disease. Karl was a horrible provider: Infant mortality was high in this era, and two of Karl’s own brothers died from tuberculosis as toddlers. Creditors and landlords should never have been allowed to confiscate children’s clothes. But Karl is to blame for having kids while resolutely refusing work to support his family. A professional revolutionary should remain a bachelor. Marx tried to support his family by writing economics articles published by various journals, from small rebel papers, to THE ECONOMIST, even the NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, which for a few years paid him a steady salary as a columnist. It was never enough money. He begged money from friends and looted Jenny’s inheritance. Whenever one of his wife’s wealthy relatives died, Marx shouted in joy. After years of starvation, his friend Engels inherited a factory in Manchester and a generous trust fund, a portion of which he gave to the Marx family as annual income of £350, allowing them to live as middle class, allowing Marx to abandon journalism to devote himself entirely to DAS KAPITAL. “A Prussian Police Agent’s Report, 1853” from THE PORTABLE KARL MARX, 1983 “Marx is of middling height, powerfully built. However, one can tell at first glance that this is a man of genius and energy…. In his private life he is highly disorderly and a bad manager. He lives the life of a gypsy, of an intellectual Bohemian; washing, combing and changing his linen are things he does rarely, he likes to get drunk. He is often idle for days on end, but when he has work to do, he will work day and night with tireless endurance. For him there is no such thing as a fixed time for sleeping and waking. He will often stay up the whole night and then lie down on the sofa, fully dressed, around midday and sleep till evening, untroubled by the fact that the whole world comes and goes through his room. His wife is the sister of the Prussian Minister, von Westphalen, a cultured and pleasant woman who now feels perfectly at home in such misery. She has two girls and one son. As a husband and a father, Marx is the gentlest and mildest of men in spite of his wild and restless character. Marx lives in one of the worst, and therefore one of the cheapest, quarters of London. There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture to be found in the whole apartment: everything is broken, tattered and torn; everywhere, too, the greatest disorder: manuscripts, books and newspapers, then the children’s toys, his wife’s mending and patching, together with several cups with chipped rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps.... When you enter Marx’s room, smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water so badly. One chair has only three legs. On another chair, which happens to be whole, the children are playing at cooking.... None of this embarrasses Marx or his wife: Intellectually spirited and agreeable conversation makes amends.” MARXISM Maximilien Rubel, MARX WITHOUT MYTH “Here Marx exposes the fundamental relation between capital and labour: Capital demands a maximum available labour force in order to keep wages down. Overpopulation is therefore favourable to the development of capital. The bourgeoisie, which sees this excessive population growth as a ‘natural phenomenon,’ is able to ignore its own role, and ‘can observe the proletariat reduced by famine just as it observes other natural phenomena, without being moved, and considers the misery of the proletariat as its own doing, to be punished as such.’” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels visited the Manchester factory Engels inherited that funded their income, and they were shocked by the misery of their own workers: This factory couldn’t compete with other factories unless it forced women and children to work overtime for slave wages with no safety standards and no benefits. In sweet irony, Marx and Engels would use their factory income to fund their writing calling for revolution to overthrow this entire industrial system: Marx and Engels wrote THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in 1847. Marx wrote his masterpiece, DAS KAPITAL, in 1867. Venture capitalists invest in whatever they think will yield maximum profit— usually they invest in latest technology trend— thus a boom cycle begins and some people get rich. Investment capital is eventually exhausted, leading to bust and recession. A diverse marketplace can weather a recession better than a market dominated by giant monopolies. Giants may collapse completely, forcing many workers into unemployment. Marx called this “anarchy of the market,” and predicted a severe bust would cause workers to lose their temper and overthrow this system. In Marx’s era, England was the most industrialized nation: Toxic air and water pollution poisoned everybody, leading to fatal disease epidemics and clouds of thick sooty smog London suffered for a century. London’s Cockney laborers were dying miserable deaths from cholera in drinking water from the filthy Thames and tuberculosis epidemics aggravated by air pollution. ALL MONEY IS BLOOD MONEY: Marx said, “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood.” English Aristocracy inherited fortunes from ancestors who stole this wealth through battle conquests. Wealth of Victorian England was labor and resources stolen from colonies. In India, British imperialists stole cotton, silk and tea; in South Africa they stole diamonds and minerals. When China refused to buy opium, Britain launched the Opium War to steal Hong Kong. Vladimir Lenin saw the British Empire as proof that Capitalism and Imperialism are one and the same. CAPITALISTS EXPLOIT LABOR AND RESOURCES TO EXHAUSTION: Profit is merely excess labor. Owners have nothing to do with this profit; it comes entirely from workers who should own it. Capitalists are parasites of workers who are the true creators of wealth. SURPLUS VALUE is the key Marxist tenet: Profit comes from exploiting workers by paying them less than the value they return to owner. Capitalists invest to make profit, but Marx argues a fair and modest profit could be made by selling products slightly above cost of production. Instead of accepting modest profit, capitalists maximize profit by exploiting workers far beyond toleration, transforming “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” into intolerable wage slavery. WEALTH IS LABOR, nothing else: Natural resources mean nothing until workers process resources. Labor hours involved in processing natural resources are what gives products value. When you buy anything, you are buying labor. Even if you buy raw timber or coal, the price you pay is based on the labor required to deliver these raw materials. At each stage of adding value, capitalists exploit workers by paying wages lower than the value of labor: Millionaires are vampire parasites. GLOBALIZATION IS IMPERIALISM: Wages are based not on value of products, but on labor market supply and demand. Capitalists have vested interest in making workers poor, to force them to accept slave wages. This is the motive behind overpopulation, encouraging poor families to have many babies, flooding labor markets with immigrants to destroy domestic wages, terrorizing domestic workers by moving overseas to cheaper labor markets. Globalization is turning workers into miserable outsourced downsized desesperados. LABOR AND RESOURCES ALL THAT MATTERS: Goods and services should be provided “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Workers must control the means of production. Profit belongs to workers who create it. PERMANENT REVOLUTION: Democratic elections lead to corruption as the public will sell out to any candidate who promises them more wealth. Elections must be replaced with a “Permanent Revolution.” SOCIALISM REQUIRES ATHEISM: Marx was an atheist who saw religion as “opium for the masses,” brainwashing to perpetuate social hierarchy and prevent progress: Socialists must be Atheists. Karl Marx, Alienated Labour, 1844 “The more wealth the worker produces, the more his production increases in power and scope, the poorer he becomes. Indeed, work itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort. His work therefore is not voluntary, but it is coerced, forced labor. If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is alien, a forced activity, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than me. Now who is that other being? The gods???” Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848 “In proportion as the bourgeoisie developed, in the same proportion developed the proletariat, the modern working class, a class of workers who live only so long as they can find work, and who can find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These workers must sell themselves piecemeal as a commodity, exposed to all the competition and fluctuations of the market. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and the bourgeois state; but they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine and the overseer. No sooner is the exploitation of the worker by the manufacturer, then he is set upon by other portions of the bourgeoisie: the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker. Law, morality and religion are to the worker just so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all, are its own grave-diggers!” DAS KAPITAL In CASE CLOSED: LEE HARVEY OSWALD AND THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK, Gerald Posner documents that Oswald would rant that DAS KAPITAL was his favorite book, yet he was barely literate and probably did not read DAS KAPITAL, just the Cliffnotes version. Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy because he considered himself a Marxist at war with Capitalists: Oswald was killed at age 24, but had spent his life pursuing Marxism: He appeared in Moscow demanding the Soviet Union accept him as an American political refugee. When he grew to hate his tedious job in Russia, he fled back to Texas. He tried to enlist in Fidel Castro’s Cuban Army. He fled to Mexico City to beg the Russian Consulate to return him to Russia. He stood on streets in Louisiana and Texas wearing a “Hands Off Cuba!” poster, and appeared on radio talk shows. Oswald quoted Marxist tenets, but some who debated this high school drop-out dismissed him as crazy, one saying, “My God, what an idiot!” DAS KAPITAL is heavy reading, written in boring Latinate prose: Many barely literate workers claim to be inspired by DAS KAPITAL. Such workers may be inspired more by the idea of this work, rather than the prose. Marxism grows to mean a Universal Ethic: The rich must stop screwing the poor! Karl Marx, DAS KAPITAL, 1867, Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power “He who before was the money-owner now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but: a hiding.” Marx wrote “Chapter 28” to show socioeconomic injustice flourishing long before capitalism: The Enclosure of the Commons was a crime: Elizabethan warlords stole yeoman farmlands, drove yeomen begging onto London streets, then outlawed begging, then imprisoned this beggar class for centuries, until Georgian aristocrats embarked on their Final Solution, chaining and shipping thousands of English and Irish poor to tragic permanent exile in Australia: Talk about being disenfranchised! Karl Marx, DAS KAPITAL, 1867, Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated “The proletariat created by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this ‘free’ proletariat could not possibly be absorbed as fast as it was thrown upon the world: They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds.... Henry VIII. 1530: Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s license. On the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal…. Edward VI. 1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. All persons have the right to take away the children of vagabonds and to keep them as apprentices, the young men until the 24th year, the girls until the 20th…. Elizabeth, 1572: Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear; in case of a repetition of the offence, if they are over 18, they are to be executed.... James I: Any one wandering about and begging is declared a rogue and vagabond…. Agricultural people, expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.... The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital.” Karl Marx, DAS KAPITAL, 1867, Chapter 31: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.... The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained besides the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as the Chinese trade in general.... Monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The employees themselves fixed the price and plundered at will. The Trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases: A contract for opium was given to a certain Sullivan. Sullivan sold his contract to one Binn for £40,000; Binn sold it the same day for £60,000.... The Company and its employees from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 from the Indians as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a famine by buying up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices…. The small and nimble fingers of little children being the most in request, the custom sprang up of procuring apprentices from parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many thousands of these hapless creatures were sent down, being from the age of 7 to the age of 13 or 14. Cruelty was of course the consequence: in many cases they starved to the bone while flogged to their work, and even in some instances, were driven to commit suicide. Beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire, secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitude of torture.... If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Karl Marx, DAS KAPITAL, 1867, Chapter 33: Modern Theory of Colonisation “The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this, that it not only constantly reproduces wage-worker as wage-worker, but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of capital, a relative surplus population of wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of labour is kept in the right rut: the social dependence of the labourer upon the capitalist. But in the colonies this pretty fancy is torn asunder: The law of supply and demand of labour falls to pieces. The wage-worker of today is tomorrow an independent peasant or artisan working for himself. They soon cease to be labourers for hire; they become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters. Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! Therefore let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough to buy land. The funds resulting from the sale of such land the Government is to employ to import more have-nothings from Europe, and thus keep the labour market full for the capitalists. The great republic America has therefore ceased to be the Promised Land for immigrant labour. The only thing that interests us here is the secret discovered in the new world: Production and accumulation of capitalist private property requires the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer.” WHY COMMUNISM FAILED “Your prophecies proved truer than mine; and yet fell short of the fact, for instead of a million, the destruction of 8 or 10 million human beings has probably been the effect of these convulsions. I did not, in ‘89, believe they would last so long, nor cost so much blood.” Thomas Jefferson to John Adams on the French Revolution “Those previous workers having just become rulers or representatives of the people will cease being workers; they will look at workers from their heights, they will represent not the people but themselves. He who doubts it does not know human nature.” Mikhail Bakunin “They pretended, perhaps they even believed, they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.... Power is not a means, it is an end.” George Orwell “When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I expected: His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.” Bertrand Russell “Stalin is the true and legitimate guardian of the Russian Revolution, which he has not in any sense ‘betrayed’ but merely carried forward on lines that were implicit in it from the start: Well before 1923 the seeds of a totalitarian society were quite plainly there. Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely. Had he lived, it is probable that he would either have been thrown out, like Trotsky, or would have kept himself in power by methods as barbarous, or nearly as barbarous, as those of Stalin.” George Orwell Lenin and Stalin are mass murderers: In V.I. LENIN, Robert Conquest concludes that the Russian Revolution murdered ten million people from 1918-1920: One million were killed in battles and massacres during Civil War between Reds, Whites, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; another nine million starved to death in famine caused by the Revolution. Lenin ordered the Czar’s family killed. Lenin ordered the deaths of thousands. Stalin killed another ten million. Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924) brought Marxism to Russia and founded the Soviet Union. In 1905 he tried but failed to overthrow Czarists. Enraged by the misery of World War I, the public embraced the Revolution of 1917. Lenin’s Bolsheviks fought a bitter civil war against Mensheviks and White Czarists. By 1920 the Communist Party had seized power, and Lenin had been shot twice. His health shattered, he suffered a stroke, dying at age 54. Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) merely wanted to be a dictator. Through his purges and pograms, Stalin murdered ten million people, working many to death in Siberian Gulags. He built the Soviet Union and defeated Hitler, but he bastardized Marxism into Stalinist totalitarianism. Marx was wrong in his assumption that capitalism must collapse: Not even the Great Depression could kill it: Recessions are barely felt by white collar executives who keep jobs and steady paychecks. The glaring flaw of communism is the total reliance upon the Central Committee to manage every aspect of life: Marx’s friend Bakunin condemned the Central Committee because absolute power would absolutely corrupt committee members. Marx called for Permanent Revolution to purge corrupt officials. Bakunin said this would never happen. Stalinism proved Bakunin was right. Mikhail Bakunin was a tall, heavy Russian hothead with a long unkempt beard, chased by governments across Europe as a revolutionary wanted for organizing riots in 1848: After the Dresden riots in 1849, he was caught. Incredibly, once arrested he was sentenced to death in Germany, Austria and Russia, yet he managed to avoid execution of all three death sentences, was thrown into a Russian prison for six years, exiled to Siberia for six more years, then he took a wife, escaped to America, and returned to Switzerland! He formed the Social Democratic Alliance. For a while penniless Bakunin sponged free dinners from the starving Marx family in London. But Marx and Engels saw Bakunin as a threat. Marx and Engels savaged intellectual competitors, especially leftist allies Lassalle and Bakunin, whom they feared would try to take over the International Workers Association: Bakunin strongly disagreed with Marx’s state control. Bakunin broke with Marx in 1872 at the First International Party Congress. They even challenged each other to a pistol duel, which they later canceled. Bakunin said: “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself.” Engels replied: “I know nothing more authoritarian than a revolution when you impose your will on others with bombs and bullets.” Bakunin wanted to smash the state. Marx thought it madness to attack the state, since it would unleash its military to destroy rebels. Power is held by capitalists who use the state as their weapon. Engels wrote in 1872: “Bakunin maintained the state is the chief evil. We on the contrary say: Abolish capital, and the state will fall of itself. The difference is essential: abolition of the state is nonsense without a social revolution beforehand; abolition of capital is the social revolution.” Bakunin preached Anarchy, a kind of libertarian Jeffersonian Democracy of landowning farmers, devoid of poverty, slavery, crime, police or central government: The Anarchist Ideal is Utopian, its tenet being: “live and let live.” In practice, Anarchy has often proven impractical and unrealistic. Communism was doomed to fail: Marx’s Central Committee would control all means of production and outlaw private property. With private property forbidden, there is no incentive for citizens to be productive or innovative. As government makes mistakes in allocating resources, the economy collapses. Despite attempts at a Permanent Revolution, the best houses, cars and perks in communist regimes wind up in hands of Central Committee members— corruption exactly as Bakunin warned. Mao Zedong (1893-1976) was the son of a peasant but attended Peking University, where he discovered Marxism: Mao became leader of the KMT Kuomingtang Nationalist Party to fight imperial aristocrats. In 1926 Mao split with KMT General Chiang Kai-Shek. Mao founded the Chinese Communist Party and led the Red Brigade in civil war against the KMT. The two parties united to fight the Japanese in World War II, but resumed the civil war immediately after. Chiang Kai-Shek fled to island of Taiwan where his KMT would govern the Taiwanese for fifty years. The Chinese Communist Party is now the world’s largest, but could hardly be called Marxist. Communism is a proven failure: Communist China exploits and oppresses workers more than any other nation. Chinese Communist Party officials are a ruling bourgeoisie business class that exploits the public as industrial slaves. Communism failed throughout the Soviet Union. North Korea is a disaster. Vietnam is abandoning Marxism. Cuba may abandon Marxism after Castro. Everywhere, Marx would have to admit, communism failed. SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IT IS TIME FOR AMERICAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: Social Democracy accepts the capitalist free market yet admits capitalists cannot be trusted: Public Interest requires stewardship from public agencies. Social Democracy is strong progressive tax, strong regulation of corporations, strong stewardship of ecosystems and social infrastructure, prevention of tax shelters and prevention of campaign finance corruption. Millionaires must be placed into higher progressive tax brackets so that the more money they earn, the more society will benefit. All tax shelters must be shut down. Social Democracy brings high quality of life for everyone. Britain, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, Europe and South America enjoy Social Democracy, even as America is stuck in a Dark Age: America must catch up with the rest of the world. “Bakunin,” “Economic Theory,” “Lenin,” “Marx and Marxism,” “Mao,” “Adam Smith,” “Stalin” The Encyclopedia Britannica 2000 “Noam Chomsky interviewed by Tor Wennerberg,” 1998, www.worldmedia.com.archive Robert Conquest, V.I. LENIN. New York: Viking Press 1972 Peter Dougherty, WHO’S AFRAID OF ADAM SMITH? Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons 2002 Joseph Ellis, FOUNDING BROTHERS: THE REVOLUTIONARY GENERATION. New York: Vintage Books 2000, p 237 “A Prussian Police Agent’s Report, 1853” THE PORTABLE KARL MARX, edited by Eugene Kamenka. Middlesex, England: Viking Penguin Books, 1983, pp. 40-42 Karl Marx, “Alienated Labour, 1844” THE PORTABLE KARL MARX, edited by Eugene Kamenka. Middlesex, England: Viking Penguin Books, 1983, pp 131-146 Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” THE PORTABLE KARL MARX, edited by Eugene Kamenka. Middlesex, England: Viking Penguin Books, 1983, pp 203-217 Karl Marx, “Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power” DAS KAPITAL, 1867. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ Karl Marx, “Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated” DAS KAPITAL, 1867. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ Karl Marx, “Capital, Chapter 31: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” THE PORTABLE KARL MARX, edited by Eugene Kamenka. Middlesex, England: Viking Penguin Books, 1983, pp 478-490 Karl Marx, “Capital, Chapter 33: Modern Theory of Colonisation” THE PORTABLE KARL MARX, edited by Eugene Kamenka. Middlesex, England: Viking Penguin Books, 1983, pp 493-503 Frank Manuel, A REQUIEM FOR KARL MARX. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1995 George Orwell, IN FRONT OF YOUR NOSE: THE COLLECTED ESSAYS, JOURNALISM AND LETTERS OF GEORGE ORWELL edited by Sonia Orwell, New York: Harcourt 1968, volume IV, p 168 Bernard Porter, THE LION’S SHARE: A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH IMPERIALISM. New York: Longman Group Limited, 1975 Gerald Posner, CASE CLOSED: LEE HARVEY OSWALD AND THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK. New York: Random House, 1993 Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale, MARX WITHOUT MYTH: A CHRONOLOGICAL STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND WORK. New York: Harper & Row 1975 |