Abstracting Communism

10 months ago
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We must first identify what Marxism is. Marxism is simply the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels. I know the title of this video is “These Protests are Innately Communist,” but in reality, it is more specific than that. Communism existed at least several hundred years before Karl Marx. The idea of a classless and egalitarian society is said to have emerged in Ancient Greece, and Communist thought is said to be traceable back to Thomas More’s 1516 treatise “Utopia.” However, fast forward to 1848 with the revised interpretation of communist thought with The Communist Manifesto authored by Karl Marx and his associate.
In short, it’s possible to be a communist and not be a Marxist.
What makes Karl Marx’s iteration of communism so pervasive is by the very tactics he uses in an attempt to bolster his politics. He offers a very revisionist and bizarre interpretation of society.
In the first line of the first chapter of the Communist manifesto, a very bold claim is made. “The history of all hitherto existing society† is the history of class struggles.” Meaning that all of history up to the point of this declaration is a history of class struggles.
Making class struggle the sole principle by how you view politics undermines every single tribulation humanity has gone through at this point. He continues
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome, we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. ”
Owning a business, leading an organization, owning property, in the eyes of a Marxist is equivalent to being a slave master, dictator, or oppressor.
Any hierarchical structure that you see is simply just oppressor vs oppressed. Your success is built by the exploitation of subordinates under you.
According to Marx and his associate “The immediate aim of the Communists is the… the overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” This line doubles down on the Marxist view that the world is defined by class struggles thus divided by oppressor vs oppressed. It also makes it clear that their goal is to dismantle and replace what they perceive as the status quo.
Very interestingly, Marx and his associate write “The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.” which is an admission that their focus is not going to property owners of who they perceive to be oppressed. It’s going after the oppressors. Its end goal is certainly the abolition of private property, but until they supplant the powerful and wealthy, they won’t move to abolition the entirety of private property. This is about giving the proletariat an advantage.
It’s important to highlight that Marx viewed property as “...the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.”
Wealth, capital, and property is viewed by the Marxists to be a social power.
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