Communist Manifesto revisited
It seems like only yesterday when in the '50s my classmates and I practiced "duck, tuck, and cover," sheltered beneath our desks during Civil Defense alerts, and were weaned on phrases such as "We will bury you." It is hoped for our progeny's sake that the corrupt, dehumanizing communist system that induced such madness, extinguished individual liberty for hundreds of millions, and slaughtered tens of millions remains exposed for what it is and lingers on as only a tattered remnant, an historical anecdote.
Or does it yet thrive in subtler form? We know, of course, that varying levels of communism, and certainly socialism, are still practiced in Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and China and its vassal states, and is slowly being implemented in Venezuela by the autocratic Hugo Chavez. It also occasionally rears its insidious head here and there in the guise of terrorist organizations. But what of the West? What of the United States?
Misguided idealism
The answer may well lie in a retrospective look at The Communist Manifesto, an 1843 document authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German economists and historians. Their document, too lengthy to be a concise declaration of principles and too brief to be a book, can effectively be synopsized by the ten guiding tenets of what was to become a new order. Even today, at least to the socially and politically naive, the rules foster dreams of an ideal society, a utopian paradise for mankind, but only after class struggle and regardless of method or cost. In practice, however, their employment proved and still prove to be nothing short of dehumanizing and degenerative.
Before reading Marx and Engels, give some thought to the following:
- Nationalized "free" healthcare;
- Disintegration of the family unit;
- The Kelo private property takings case recently heard by the Supreme Court;
- The ongoing campaign to maintain or increase personal income, corporate, and estate taxes;
- The clamor for more government-controlled, tax-funded social programs;
- The assault on and ridicule of organized religion;
- Undisguised loathing and denigration of our military;
- Partisan politicization, historical revisionism, and forced social programming occurring within our public schools;
- Lack of parents' rights or parental control over public school curricula;
- Blatant bias and false reporting by print and electronic news media;
- Mandated diversity quotas in all phases of life;
- Veneration of hate crimes over what should simply be crimes;
- Never-ending promotion and demonization of conceived class and race inequity; and
- Daily attacks on personal freedoms of choice and thought:
Listed below are the ten rules of Marx and Engels:
- Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
- A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
- Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
- Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
- Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
- Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
- Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
- Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
- Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
Does any of this sound familiar? Of course it does -- and whatever your social, political, or economic perspective, the study of this document is vital to your continuing education. It is important because it serves as a primer of the ideas that form the foundation of communist and socialist ideology. And therein lies its flaw.
Flawed premise
The manifesto has been repeatedly proven flawed because it's foundation, the heart of its philosophy, presumed that the working class would ultimately prevail over capitalism. Marx and Engels could not comprehend that by its very nature, capitalism would elevate the working class to the entrepreneur class through free enterprise opportunity, and never the other way round. They could not foresee that the efficiencies and incentives brought about by capitalist enterprise, if allowed to operate in a free environment, always provides a high standard of living for the citizens of practicing nations.
I leave it to your good judgment to discern the validity of either concept.