Workers of the world, it’s your day

“Do you think it will come back in vogue, or back in power?”

Of course. Utopian visionaries never give up the dream.

Ironic that the Congress is currently working on an immigration bill that is about as anti-worker as it gets. Crony capitalists colluding to depress worker wages while at once increasing demand and profits for those at the top.

Also, Marx was an economist not a politician. He makes some salient point in his analyses, particularly of asymmetries.

Well, May 1 is “Law Day” here in the U.S.

http://www.lawday.org

Bourgeoisie of the world unite!

OK, seriously, if you read the Communist Manifesto, its ten planks are inseparable from a very aggressive government. How do you abolish private property in land and devote its rents to public purposes without a government that we would only see in our nightmares, for example? Or the establishment of industrial armies without mass concscription, or the centralization of credit in the hands of the state?

Will a variation of Marx’s dream happen? Well, we’ve got #2 (progressive income tax), part of #3 (abolition of right to inheritance–the estate tax infringes), the Federal Reserve (#5), part of #6 with government roads, a common plan for improving soil via the USDA (#7 in part , and #10 with public education and abolition of child labor.

That said, I think that the rest is a stretch until we really get a lot more faith in government, a faith in government that is likely to decline greatly with the government we’ve got now. :^)

@6 Yes, all well and good, but practically speaking Marx wasn’t a politician crafting policies. He was just musing. It would be great if those reading him had had some discernment, too, you know. Take Gregory the Great’s musing on the idea of a post mortem purgatory, which later others ran with and actually put into practice. So, who is the bigger fool, the fool or the fool who follows him? How is it others actually bought into Marx’s ideas? It is about as dumb as if a sci fi writer were to invent a religion on a lark just to see if he could get anyone to go for it… oh wait…

Gotta love the new Pope.
Except for the reactionary Righties on here. And the Ayn Rand-loving Catholics like Paulie Ryan, et. al.
“Pope Francis Condemns ‘Slave Labor’ In Bangladesh: ‘Goes Against God'”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/pope-francis-slave-labor_n_3191288.html?

Dust,

My comments are generally short ’cause I ain’t got the noggin skilz to put together coherent thoughts into a longer form. Not that my shorter comments are coherent either, of course. Just ask Todd.

My short, invisible comments on today’s topics were cleverly designed to allow me to loiter in the shadows lurking, while rubbernecking the comments via email.

Sometimes you can observe a lot just by watching.

Curt; I would counter that what you really have, then, is a spectrum of Communists and Socialists, not exactly Marxists, no? Or, put differently, if “words mean things,” than I’d expect a Marxist to give assent to a great portion of the doctrines of Karl Marx, in the same way that I’d expect a Calvinist to affirm the doctrines of grace, a Lutheran to affirm Augsburg and Concord, and so on.

Understood that words can change, yes, and as a Baptist, I know very well that “Baptist” can mean a whole range of Christians and even some non-Christians who immerse believers. That conceded, I’m thinking that less than 150 years after Marx’s death, we can use “Marxism” in its strict sense, even using the Manifesto to point out to gullible socialists and liberals that they are not, thankfully, a Marxist in the historic sense.