Spent the week nursing a boy. 102 F. temperatures are nothing to sneeze at.
But mostly I have been pondering the nature of preppers and their habitual political leanings. To be blunt, there appears to be no apparent thought to the process, merely a knee-jerk "anti-Communist" "pro-freedom" set of leaning that really doesn't make sense in the current modern political climate.
We have entered the final stages of capitalism as envisioned by Marx and Engels. The capitalists (owners of production) are doing their level best to make sure that the workers are in thrall and kept there. I cannot think of a better way of describing the process that is occurring. Yet the preppers see everything as a commie plot to take their freedoms. Shit. The communists here in the US are so damn lame that they couldn't take their own temperature, let alone your freedoms.
Yet whenever someone stands up and say that capitalism is fucking us over, they are labeled as a godless commie and the dumb-fucks on the lunatic fringe of the prep movement go all John Birch. They would rather kill a commie who has an excellent handle on the nature of the problem than listen to him. Sure, Marx and Engels had some less than stellar ideas about how to solve the inherent contradictions of capitalism, but you sure can't begrudge them their absolutely right-on and prescient description of the depredations of capitalism.
So, I would highly recommend that y'all back off of the comrades. Hell, I think that if you listen to them without mindlessly bouncing dated and invalid screeching out of your yap, you might find that they are on the same side you are.
Again, this does not mean that I agree with communist theory at all levels. Hell, I think that even the Commies are embarrassed by how badly the term was misused in the twentieth century.
4 comments:
Some good points. Although I wouldn't want to subject myself to what the Chinese and Russian/Soviet citizens had to endure in the 20th century.
No doubt that our democracy/capitalist system has morphed into something quite sinister. It reminds me of The Beast Of The Revelation from the bible. Started out good, to deceive the people, then enslaves them.
Mahtomedi:
I would argue that the Chinese and Russian governments of the twentieth century would have shocked and appalled Marx and Engles themselves.
Just because you say that you are a communist society doesn't mean you are one. Those countries were autocratic dictatorships or oligarchies.
I hope you and your boy get to feeling better soon, that cold is a miserable SOB.
Boiling Marx's philosophy down to the basics, here's how I understand it: The "haves" (the owners of the means of production) can be depended upon to systematically exploit and screw over the "have nots" (wage-earners). This being the case, the "have-nots" would do well to recognize themselves as an exploited class, to organize, and to act in such a way as to minimize the screwage. Of course Marx wasn't the only one to come to this conclusion, and there's a tradition of organized labor in the USA that arose independent of Marx. During the Cold War, Marxism was used in the Communist states as a pretext for imposing totalitarian state rule in a way that benefited ruling elites. In the USA, any attempts of have-nots to organize in pursuit of their own interests (labor unions etc.) have been branded as being in sympathy with the Communist enemy states and therefore subversive if not traitorous. So yes, maybe now that the Red Menace isn't Red anymore (are fellow-capitalists China and Russia now our "friends"...?), we can look at Marx without the taint of their or our statist propaganda.
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