Written by Scott on July 13, 2008
We’ve developed our newest line of t-shirts, bumper stickers, baseball caps, etc. to call attention to how radically liberal… no socialist…. no borderline communist… Obama’s real agenda is.
Now, all the libs are gonna say… ‘oh there you go to the extremes again’… au contraire. I think Marxist is spot-on as a label of the Barack Obama agenda. ”From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”is one of Marx’s most famous ideas, as it encapsulates his economic philosophy of “progressive taxation” in just one simple sentence. If you ask most Obama supporters if they agree with this idea, I guarantee 9 out of 10 of them would say yes.
For those of you who don’t know much about who Karl Marx is, here’s a quick lesson on the father of communism from excerpts of his very own Communist Manifesto:
The Manifesto suggested a course of action for a proletarian (working class) revolution to overthrow the bourgeois social order and to eventually bring about a classless and stateless society, and the abolition of private property.
10 Planks of the Communist Manifesto
- 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 right of inheritance.
- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
- Centralization of credit in the hands 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 liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
- Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
- Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production
According to the Communist Manifesto, all these were prior conditions for a transition from capitalism to communism.
Marxism (statism) is, of course, a discredited and failed ideology… except for those on the radical left of the political spectrum. Even the NY Times recognized Marxism as a failed ideology. This from the Times:
COMMUNISM WITHOUT MARX
The economic failure of Marxism has been visible in both Leninist and non-Leninist states, but the former have a much harder time correcting their errors. The Bolsheviks will celebrate the 70th anniversary of their revolution this year. Many other countries, with different cultures and historical backgrounds, have practiced ”the Leninist version” of Marxism for a generation or more. None of these countries have been able to produce to the satisfaction of their people or to provide a better way of creating and distributing wealth.
IN COMMUNIST COUNTRIES, the appreciation of the importance of the market is expanding. Many have recognized that the central planning system cannot establish an adequate measure of the success or failure of an enterprise. After all, profitability is the only reliable test for economic performance (there are other tests for social value). And the only reliable way to measure profitability is through a price mechanism that is allowed to respond to market forces.
The Chinese astonished the world a few years ago by announcing that ”Marx didn’t overrule the laws of supply and demand.” And they got remarkable results by acting on their insight. Officially, China calls its policy the ‘’socialist commodity economy,” an evolving concept flexible enough to allow various kinds of experimentation. It was applied first to agriculture. Peasants were encouraged to use a part of the state-owned land for their own purposes after fulfilling their state production quotas; they were freed to market their surplus production on their own.
But Marx erred in many of his predictions, most flagrantly in his forecast of the evolution of capitalism. He foresaw greater and greater concentrations of monopoly power, greater and greater oppression and impoverishment of workers, so that class war of the miserable, desperate many against the moneyed few would become inevitable. He did not imagine the astonishing expansion in total wealth that could be created by industrialization, nor the development of a market in which the workers’ role as consumers would be as essential a part of the system as their role in production.
With Marxism defeated as a prevalent ideology, the left has come to “repackage” Marx’s ideas in updated rhetoric. Obama’s platform, in many respects, is nothing more than an modern day evolution of Marxism… from higher more “progressive” tax rates, to more central governmental planning, to nationalization of our healt care system, to larger and more expensive restriction on private corporations… Karl Marx has got nothing on Barack Obama.