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21.09.28.2100Tu TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS HAS PROVEN ITSELF – NOTHING KARL MARX ADVOCATED HAS!

In an attempt to answer this comment I received with as much decorum as possible I’ll first ask that you not take anything said harshly as nothing is meant to be so – though it may sound that way at first.

Since your comment was extensive, I’m going to isolate just what appears accurate to me eliminating as much of the extraneous Marxist Bull Sh%t as I can – maybe that’ll work?

It seems to me that you’ve gotten wrong , or mistaken, anything Thomas Sowell may have said – just my opinion, not anything confrontational. Trickle Down Economics can unbelievably be refined & reduced to just one word – LIBERTY. Professor Sowell couldn’t possibly misunderstand what Trickle Down Economics is. But if mixed in a dregs of Marxism it surely doesn’t make any sense at all. I know that defining Trickle Down Economics as simply LIBERTY does sound facetious on my part, but I assure you it’s not my intent. Literally everything that Karl Marx touched turned to sh%t including his life.

Trickle Down Economics = Reduced government > Reduced Taxation > Increased Liberty.

Trickle Up Economics = Increased government > increased Taxation > Less Liberty.

Both Ronald Reagan & Donald Trump (hardly right wing anything) put into practice Trickle Down Economics which result both times in Increased Tax Revenues as a result of Increased Production. Given Liberty the populous will create (produce accordingly) resulting in more Tax Revenue on that Increased Production.

So basically Trickle Down Economics just means allowing people to work with their own money – LIBERTY! There’s no such thing as LIBERTY in the socialist vocabulary therefore they can’t fathom it being advantageous to leave people alone & allow Free Market Capitalism do its magic.

PS. Whatever Karl Marx has said do the opposite! American DECENTRALIZED GOVERNMENT does play a role to play as well in opposition to MARXIST CENTRALIZED GOVERNMENT not addressed here for brevity. LIBERTY is the reduced definition of Trickle Down Economic – no big mystery there, just leave people alone, they’ll do what’s in their individual best interest which in turn has always turned out to be what’s best for the country.
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The only accurate passages (as I see it) isolated to facilitate this response – no other reason!

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Level 8
What is trickle down economics? Thomas Sowell says he has offered a reward for anyone who can define and prove what trickle down economics is. No one has claimed the prize. It keeps being mentioned by the left wing because it is attributed to right wing economics. But what is it - no one knows.

Wealth originates from production.

No. An economy doesn't trickle down. It is created by individuals in the society producing what other individuals need and/or want.
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Posted by: Jordan B Peterson ~ Apr 17, 2021
“Jordan Peterson's Critique of the Communist Manifesto”

1914wizard 8 Sep 28
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1

“Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,”
began Kolya in his joke-telling voice.

“Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan.
‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’
‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’
‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’
‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.”

― David Benioff, City of Thieves

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The Five Year Plan

The basic planning tool in the Soviet system was the five-year plan, as instituted by Stalin at the end of the 1920s. Early on, plan targets were pretty simple: so many tons of coal to be mined, so many tons of steel to be produced, and so on. The enterprise manager would be rewarded for meeting the targets or punished for failing to meet the objective.

In the Stalin period, not meeting your goal might mean exile to Siberia or worse—although after Stalin died, the major loss for an enterprise manager who did not meet his target would simply be the loss of the job and all the perks that went with that position.

Because the targets for an enterprise manager were always set in physical terms, this led to some pretty dysfunctional behavior. For example, if a turbine enterprise manager was given a target of 100 turbines for the month, the incentive would be to produce the smallest turbines possible, even if larger ones were needed.

The system of targets produced a strong tendency in enterprise managers to maintain the status quo. If they tried new techniques of production that might possibly be more efficient—and if the new approach failed—then they could lose their jobs.

One of the chief criticisms of the Soviet economy was its lack of innovation—in terms of production methods and in range of new products. The typical Soviet manager was not focused on minimizing costs or maximizing sales revenues.

In part, that’s because Soviet-era managers had every incentive to hire as many workers as possible. More workers meant an easier task of meeting production targets. This created excess demand for labor and was a main reason that there was always full employment in the Soviet Union.

Full employment didn’t mean efficient use of labor, of course. Often, enterprises would employ workers who didn’t do anything but were around in case production needed to be increased quickly to meet the target as the month came to a close. This practice of feverishly rushing to meet the target at the end of each month was called storming, and it’s a pretty inefficient way to get the job done.

Storming leads to shoddy quality of products and exhaustion of the workers. Afterward, the workers might need to rest a bit at the beginning of the next month. And if they rest too long, they will need to storm again. As the Soviet economy developed throughout the 20th century, this situation of shoddy and old-fashioned products became worse and worse. People in the West heard stories of Soviet citizens hounding visiting tourists for jeans, portable radios, and makeup.

As bad as Soviet consumer goods were, the problem was surpassed by the problem of consumer services. In part, that’s because in the Soviet planning system, if you couldn’t weigh or measure something, it wasn’t counted in the total production figures. So, services didn’t get counted as something valuable. Repair services, communication, personal care, restaurants, and retail sales were almost nonexistent in the Soviet economy.

  • The Great Courses - Capitalism vs. Socialism: Comparing Economic Systems by Professor Edward F. Stuart, Ph.D. Northeastern Illinois University

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“The modern-day ultra-Left ideology of “Cultural Marxism” takes yesterday’s Soviet Marxist-Leninist model and stands it on its head. Revolution on this alternative path no longer envisions a cataclysmic clash between workers and capitalists as the final act. Rather, contemporary revolutionary doctrine is far more dangerous: it is based on a nonviolent, persistent, and “quiet” transformation of American traditions, families, education, media, and support institutions day-by-day. The seizure of political and economic power remains a key objective, but this “final act” is really a first step in transforming the existing cultural order. The political, economic, social, and cultural realities in the early twenty-first century, as compared to the late 1960s may differ in detail, but the over-all progressive-socialist-marxist goal of transforming American culture and destroying the existing form of constitutional democratic government from within remains unchanged.”

“The call to level the playing field, pushed to its logical conclusion, is a call for the systematic subversion of American individualism and democracy. It is the kitsch marxism of our time.

The belief in the power of "institutional racism" allows black civil rights leaders to denounce America as a "racist" society, when it is the only society on earth-black, white, brown, or yellow whose defining public creed is anti-racist, a society to which black refugees from black-ruled nations regularly flee in search of refuge and freedom. The phantom of institutional racism allows black leaders to avoid the encounter with real problems within their own communities, which are neither caused by whites nor soluble by the actions of whites, but which cry out for attention.

After the class, I went up to the teacher and said that I admired her pedagogy in advising the students that she was not there to tell them what to think, but to teach them how. On the other hand, I thought that assigning an ideological marxist tome as the course's only text worked at cross-purposes with that goal. At once the smile disappeared from her face. She said: "Well, they get the other side from the newspapers." Education like this costs Bates parents thirty thousand dollars each year in tuition alone.” ― David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes

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“But it would be a mistake to assume that the liberal class was simply seduced by the Utopian promises of globalism. It was also seduced by careerism. Those who mouthed the right words, who did not challenge the structures being cemented into place by the corporate state, who assured the working class that the suffering was temporary and would be rectified in the new world order, were rewarded. They were given public platforms on television and in the political arena. They were held up to the wider society as experts, sages, and specialists. They became the class of wise men and women who were permitted to explain in public forums what was happening to us at home and abroad. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a cheer leader for the Iraq war and globalization, became the poster child for the new class of corporate mandarins. And although Friedman was disastrously wrong about the outcome of the occupation, as he was about the effects of globalization, he continues, with a handful of other apologists, to dominate the airwaves.” ― Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class

0

“I remembered Papa talking about Stalin confiscating peasants' land, tools, and animals. He told them what crops they would produce and how much they would be paid. I thought it was ridiculous. How could Stalin simply take something that didn't belong to him, something that a farmer and his family had worked their whole lives for? "That's communism, Lina," Papa had said.” ― Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

Hoover Institution - Uncommon Knowledge: Part 1: Stephen Kotkin on Stalin’s Rise to Power

Recorded on July 29, 2015

Part 1: Stalin was born in a small town in Georgia in which he was educated to become a priest. After succeeding in school and becoming a devout follower of the faith, Stalin left the priesthood and became a communist revolutionary. World War I and the revolutions of 1917 set the stage for Stalin and the Communists to take power in Russia.

Hoover Institution - Uncommon Knowledge: Part 2: Stephen Kotkin discusses Stalin’s consolidation of power

Recorded on July 29, 2015

As part 2 begins Lenin is dead and Stalin is trying to consolidate power. Although various people were vying for the position, Stalin had already effectively taken over Lenin’s job. Lenin’s last will and testament says bad things about all his successors, with Trotsky coming out the best, yet does nothing to dislodge Stalin from power. Stalin continues, through hard work and cunning, to gather power but also because people believed that he stood for the principles of the revolution.

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“There is nothing illogical in the desire of the "have-nots" to appropriate the wealth of the "haves"; in fact, it is part and parcel of the law of animal life. The bear robs the hive and the wolf the fold, and when "nature red in tooth and claw" is stretched into its human dimension, there is nothing irrational in Marx's theory that, granted the power, one social class should devour another. But what is irrational is, to assume that by robbing the hive the bear will assume the industry of the bee, or by robbing the fold the wolf will become as pacific as the sheep. It is astonishing that a man of Marx's high intelligence could have believed in ritualistic cannibalism on the social plane; that by wresting the forces of production from the bourgeoisie and centralizing them in the hands of the proletariat, the proletariat would automatically aacquire the skills of the ruling class. And it is equally astonishing that a man of Lenin's mental calibre could have attempted to put this magic into practice.”

― J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct Of War, 1789-1961: A Study of the Impact of the

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George Orwell once said that the “English intelligentsia…can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism…So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” Having experienced the reality of totalitarianism first-hand, Orwell knew all too well the ways in which people far removed from it employ “soothing phrases” to disguise more sinister ends. Of course, he would later coin the term “Newspeak” in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). This was the totalitarian language created to meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism under Big Brother.

“The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years — imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations — not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right."

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"The sacralization of politics became an essential aspect of all the communist regimes that arose during the Cold War and copied the Soviet model . . . . All communist regimes established a compulsory system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that exalted the primacy of the party as the sole and unchallenged depository of power. They all dogmatized their ideology as an absolute and unquestionable truth. They all glorified the socialist homeland and imposed a code of commandments that affected every aspect of existence. They all safeguarded their monopoly of power and truth through a police state and hard line ideological orthodoxy backed by constant surveillance and persecution, which enormously increased the number of human lives sacrificed." —Emilio Gentile

In a sense the concept of God is taken over to become the State (communist party). They take away private proprietary so no one is independently economically. They attack family units because the family could be what people have more loyalty than the state.

Communists destroy religion both the one that claims there is a God, because that means people are loyal to God not state and because it provides alternative point of view in regards to morality, and that is why the see religion like Christianity or Islam etc as rival in terms of institution but also because much like family it represents loyalty dilemma.

They also don't allow individual morality, and so they say morality is no more, this is because if there is sense of morality by individual than it can be used as a perspective from which to judge actions of the party and party is never wrong.

“In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization — the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State.

As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.”

  • Brave New World Revisited (1958) by Aldous Huxley

I think Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Warning to the West speech summarized communism well.

“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.”

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To accomplish this they also brainwash people , children when they are young, they engage in endless censorship and propaganda and they have to erase history because again it could be used as reference from which to judge the party. That is why they put effort in rewriting history, tearing down statues etc.

Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak. -- Erica Jong

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right." -- George Orwell

In George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984, doublethink is the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely. Doublethink requires using logic against logic or suspending disbelief in the contradiction.

The three slogans of the party — "War Is Peace; Freedom Is Slavery; Ignorance Is Strength" — are obvious examples of doublethink. The act of doublethink also occurs in more subtle details throughout the novel.

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I would sum up communism as a party that only cares about perpetuating its own absolute power at any costs. There is no concept of morality or loyalty in the party. Everyone , including party members are either useful or in the way, and that is why frequent purges and killing of both its own people and party members happens in communist regimes. Communist parties often contradict themselves, but they are never wrong. The only thing that matters is perpetuating the party absolute control at any costs. People are enslaved, held as hostage and everyone is expendable, and that is why the death toll of 100 millions of people in the country the rule in just 100 years is like nothing.

“[T]he important thing is that you should not argue with them. Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion, and whatever you say, they have ways of twisting into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

Regarding atheism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared "Men have forgotten God":

"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

There is nothing more dangerous than atheist playing god. I am an atheists, but I do not consider myself a God, while communists do.

“Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

"A belief in heaven is an assertion of the immortality of the soul, and the Moral Order of the universe. Without this faith, we'll never see heaven on earth. We're seeing hell instead." - Mike Stone, Restoring Belief in Heaven

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"Although there were important differences between . . . totalitarian regimes, they drew from a common well of enthusiasm, and shared such heretical goals (or rather temptations) as fashioning “new men” or establishing heaven on earth. They metabolised the religious instinct."

—Michael Burleigh

The totalitarian systems that arose in the twentieth century presented themselves as secular. Yet, as A. James Gregor argues in his book, Totalitarianism and Political Religion An Intellectual History, 2001, they themselves functioned as religions. He presents an intellectual history of the rise of these political religions, tracing a set of ideas that include belief that a certain text contains impeccable truths; notions of infallible, charismatic leadership; and the promise of human redemption through strict obedience, selfless sacrifice, total dedication, and unremitting labor. Gregor provides unique insight into the variants of Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism that dominated our immediate past. He explores the seeds of totalitarianism as secular faith in the nineteenth-century ideologies of Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Richard Wagner. He follows the growth of those seeds as the twentieth century became host to Leninism and Stalinism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism―each a totalitarian institution and a political religion.

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“When the Bolsheviks came to power they were soft and easy with their enemies . . . we had begun by making a mistake. Leniency towards such a power was a crime against the working classes. That soon became apparent ...

When there's a person, there's a problem.
When there's no person, there's no problem.
Death is the solution to all problems.
No man - no problem.
A single death is a tragedy;
a million deaths is a statistic.

You cannot make a revolution...
with silk gloves.

― Joseph Stalin

0

Defining Communism

Communism, as shaped by Karl Marx (German 1818 – 1883), is defined as the abolition of private property and a market seeking profit with a new system of collective control of the means of production and resources.

During the decade of the 1840s the word "communist" came into general use to describe those who hailed the left wing of the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution as their ideological forefathers. This political tendency saw itself as egalitarian inheritors of the 1795 Conspiracy of Equals headed by Gracchus Babeuf. The sans-culottes of Paris which had decades earlier been the base of support for Babeuf — artisans, journeymen, and the urban unemployed — was seen as a potential foundation for a new social system based upon the modern machine production of the day.

The French thinker Étienne Cabet inspired the imagination with a novel about a utopian society based upon communal machine production, Voyage en Icarie (1839). The revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui argued in favor of an elite organising the overwhelming majority of the population against the "rich," seizing the government in a coup d'état, and instituting a new egalitarian economic order.

One group of Germans in Paris, headed by Karl Schapper, organised themselves in the form of a secret society known as the League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten) and participated in a May 1839 rebellion in Paris in an effort to establish a "Social Republic." Following its failure the organisation relocated its centre to London, while also maintaining local organisations in Zürich and Paris.
Revolution was in the air across many of the monarchies of Europe.

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The Communist League (German: Bund der Kommunisten) was an international political party established on 1 June 1847 in London, England. The organisation was formed through the merger of the League of the Just, headed by Karl Schapper and the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels, Belgium, in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the dominant personalities. The Communist League is regarded as the first Marxist political party and it was on behalf of this group that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto late in 1847. The Communist League was formally disbanded in November 1852, following the Cologne Communist Trial

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Creation of the Communist League

The year 1846 found Karl Marx and his close friend and co-thinker Friedrich Engels in Brussels, establishing a small political circle of radical German émigrés called the Communist Correspondence Committee and writing for the German-language Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung ("Brussels German Newspaper" ). Also important in this early circle was Wilhelm Wolff, a talented and radical writer hailing from the Silesian peasantry who had been forced to emigrate due to his agitation against the Prussian autocracy.

The Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee had at the same time small counterparts located in London and Paris, composed of a handful of radical German expatriates living there. Relations between these small groups were not close, with petty jealousies and ideological disagreements preventing the participants from functioning as an effective political unit.

Be that as it may, in the latter part of January 1847 the disparate parts of the fledgling German Communist movement began to congeal in a single organisational entity when the London center of the League of the Just first broached the idea of organisational unity with the Communist Corresponding Committee. A letter of 20 January 1847 by Schapper requested that Marx join the League in anticipation of a scheduled London congress at which a new set of principles would be adopted based upon the ideas previously expressed by Marx and Engels. Both Marx and Engels were persuaded by the appeal and they both joined the League of the Just shortly thereafter, followed by other members of the Communist Corresponding Committee.

In June 1847, the London congress took place and the League of the Just adopted a new charter formally changing the group's name to the Communist League. The Communist League was structured around the formation of primary party units known as "communes," consisting of at least 3 and not more than 10 members. These were in turn to be combined into larger units known as "circles" and "leading circles," governed by a central authority selected at regular congresses. The League's programme called for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and establishment of the rule of the proletariat and the construction of a new society free both of private property and social classes.

The initial conference was attended by Engels, who convinced the League to change its motto to Karl Marx's phrase, Working Men of All Countries, Unite!. At the same conference, the organisation was renamed the Communist League and was reorganised significantly.

In particular, Marx did away with all "superstitious authoritarianism," as he called the rituals pertaining to secret societies. The conference itself was counted as the first congress of the new League.

The Communist League had a second congress, at Great Windmill Street, London, in November and December 1847. Both Marx and Engels attended, and they were assigned the task of composing a manifesto for the organisation. This became The Communist Manifesto.

The League was not able to function effectively during the 1848 revolutions, despite temporarily abandoning its clandestine nature. The Workers' Brotherhood was established in Germany by members of the League, and became the most significant revolutionary organisation there. During the revolution Marx edited the radical journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Engels fought in the Baden campaign against the Prussians (June and July 1849) as the aide-de-camp of August Willich.

The Communist League reassembled in late 1849, and by 1850 they were publishing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue journal, but by the end of the year, publication had ceased amid disputes between the managers of the group. Willich and Schapper wanted to continue to focus on revolutions, while Marx and Engels wanted to focus on building an international workers' movement. This would divide the league in two. The Willich-Schapper Group would be located in France and become compromised by the Prussian police.

In 1850, the German master spy Wilhelm Stieber stole the register of the League's members from Dietz, who was a member of Willich-Schapper group, which he sent to France and several German states. This would help bring about the imprisonment of several members.

In November 1852, after the Cologne Communist Trial, the organisation immediately disbanded. The Willich-Schapper Group would disband a few months after.

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The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is an 1848 pamphlet by German ideologues; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London just as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognised as one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.

The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that in their own words "[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism. In the last paragraph of the Manifesto, the authors call for a "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions", which served as a call for communist revolutions around the world.

The Communist Manifesto is divided into a preamble and four sections, the last of these a short conclusion. The introduction begins: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre." Pointing out that parties everywhere—including those in government and those in the opposition—have flung the "branding reproach of communism" at each other, the authors infer from this that the powers-that-be acknowledge communism to be a power in itself. Subsequently, the introduction exhorts Communists to openly publish their views and aims, to "meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself".

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The first section of the Manifesto, "Bourgeois and Proletarians", elucidates the materialist conception of history, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".

Societies have always taken the form of an oppressed majority exploited under the yoke of an oppressive minority. In capitalism, the industrial working class, or proletariat, engage in class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie. As before, this struggle will end in a revolution that restructures society, or the "common ruin of the contending classes". The bourgeoisie, through the "constant revolutionising of production [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions" have emerged as the supreme class in society, displacing all the old powers of feudalism. The bourgeoisie constantly exploits the proletariat for its labour power, creating profit for themselves and accumulating capital. However, in doing so the bourgeoisie serves as "its own grave-diggers"; the proletariat inevitably will become conscious of their own potential and rise to power through revolution, overthrowing the bourgeoisie.

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"Proletarians and Communists", the second section, starts by stating the relationship of conscious communists to the rest of the working class.

The communists' party will not oppose other working-class parties, but unlike them, it will express the general will and defend the common interests of the world's proletariat as a whole, independent of all nationalities. The section goes on to defend communism from various objections, including claims that it advocates communal prostitution or disincentivises people from working. The section ends by outlining a set of short-term demands—among them a progressive income tax; abolition of inheritances and private property; abolition of child labour; free public education; nationalisation of the means of transport and communication; centralisation of credit via a national bank; expansion of publicly owned land, etc.—the implementation of which would result in the precursor to a stateless and classless society.

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The third section, "Socialist and Communist Literature", distinguishes communism from other socialist doctrines prevalent at the time—these being broadly categorised as Reactionary Socialism;
Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism; and Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism. While the degree of reproach toward rival perspectives varies, all are dismissed for advocating reformism and failing to recognise the pre-eminent revolutionary role of the working class.

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"Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties", the concluding section of the Manifesto, briefly discusses the communist position on struggles in specific countries in the mid-nineteenth century such as France, Switzerland, Poland and Germany, this last being "on the eve of a bourgeois revolution" and predicts that a world revolution will soon follow. It ends by declaring an alliance with the democratic socialists, boldly supporting other communist revolutions and calling for united international proletarian action—"Working Men of All Countries, Unite!".

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In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels announced that communism could be “summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

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Associated with this were promises of total social equality and sharing in a new stage of human societal evolution. In fact, Marx’s scheme promised liberation from history, the entire record of struggle and exploitation and suffering to date. A later formulation of Marx’s was that communism would be the stage when all of society was organized along the lines of one idea: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

“Interestingly, Marxism, Communism and its derivative, Socialism, when seen years later in practice, are nothing but state-capitalism and rule by a privileged minority, exercising despotic and total control over a majority which is left with virtually no property or legal rights.” ― Andrew Carrington Hitchcock, The Synagogue Of Satan - Updated, Expanded, And Uncensored

“Therein lies the true essence of Marxism. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ only ever works with a gun in your hand." ― Philip Kerr, Prussian Blue

“Marx, concerning himself with a less remote time ("Critique of the Gotha Program" ), declared with equal conviction that the one and only means of correcting offenders (true, he referred to criminals; he never even conceived that his pupils might consider politicals offenders) was not solitary contemplation, not moral soul-searching, not repentance, and not languishing (for all that was superstructures!)—but productive labor. He himself had never taken a pick in hand. To the end of his days he never pushed a wheelbarrow, mined coal, felled timber, and we don't even know how his firewood was split—but he wrote that down on paper, and the paper did not resist.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

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“Communism looked good on paper, you know' — but how many people who say that even know what communism looks like on paper?”
― T.J. Kirk

“Are you aware that non-racist, peace-licking, universal-personhood-touting communist governments slaughtered an estimated ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE in the 20th century? The commies beat Hitler 20-1. Their unbounded love for ‘humanity’ didn’t seem to put a check on an even stronger love for controlling and killing human beings. So much for your murky notions of government-mandated humanism.” ― Jim Goad, The New Church Ladies: The Extremely Uptight World of "Social Justice"

“Socialism is a scourge, simply because it is just another mask of Communism.”
― Jean-Michel Rene Souche, Why America Will Take the Trump Train: A Essay on the 2016 Presidential Campaign

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“These people, who had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happiness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism—no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler, which at that time blinded Western eyes to all else.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

A related concept to communism is socialism. Socialism involves public ownership and control of property, and it envisions a cooperative society, in opposition to capitalist notions of private property, free market, and individual choices.

The meanings and association have shifted, but originally, communism was meant to signify a higher or full form of socialism. There were key moments when communists and socialists argued and clashed.

Anarchists, who denounced state structures of any variety as inevitably corrupting and constraining, also play a fascinating role in the story: Anarchism was sometimes an ally and yet often a fierce critic of communism.

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Communism and Terminology

The term communism only became common in the 1840s. Even after that, the word communist—in the sense of emphasizing community and common control—was applied to other kinds of social projects, like experimental communities or communes.

An Evolving Tradition

Communism featured both continuity and change. Additionally, once in power, communist regimes revealed internal contradictions, which stressed their systems. When it comes to communism, five contradictions in particular are notable.

1 - The first has to do with the role of the individual in history. Marx presented a powerful vision of history being made by masses of people. By contrast, individuals played less of a role. However, with communism, it is the case that decisive leaders loom up again and again, starting with Marx himself.

2 - The second contradiction involved geography. Although communism was meant to be global, Marx expected it to evolve first in the most industrially advanced countries. Thus, in the imagination of communists, the real prize was Germany—a leading industrial power. However, against expectations, communism’s greatest influence came in less developed countries, beginning with Lenin’s rise to power in Russia.

3 - A third problem was that communism never entirely settled its relationship to nationalism. Predating communism, nationalism as an ideology was another powerful model of community and an idea about belonging. Marx deplored nationalism; however, communist regimes tried to co-opt nationalist sentiment to use it to reinforce their power. This saw mixed and sometimes contradictory results.

4 - A fourth contradiction was the way in which the communist project turned into a tradition, even when it promised radical breaks with the past. Communism became a tradition full of historical echoes, venerable precedents, time-honored rituals, and original texts that held nearly sacred status.

5 - Finally, a fifth contradiction appeared that had everything to do with commitment to communism as a faith. While it promised scientific certainty and discarded religious dogma, communism also drew on and mobilized faith or even fanaticism. This occurred to the point that many observers have called communism a political religion.

* The Rise of Communism From Marx to Lenin by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

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1

“Marxism criticizes the world’s dominant economic system, which allows people to amass as much wealth as they can and to spend it as they wish. Should we be surprised that this critique generates backlash? To acquire things and to use them selfishly is a big part of human nature. Technological advances—the new smartphone, the new app, the new car—make each new toy more enticing and addictive. Today technology, more than religion, has become the opium of the people. In developed and developing countries alike, people long to acquire more and consume more.” ― Philip Clayton, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe

“Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance. In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender.” ― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Beneath the pseudo-scientific terminology one can in each case recognize a phantasy of which almost every element is to be found in phantasies which were already current in medieval Europe. The final, decisive battle of the Elect (be they the ‘Aryan race’ or the ‘proletariat&rsquo😉 against the hosts of evil (be they the Jews or the ‘bourgeoisie&rsquo😉; a dispensation on which the Elect are to be most amply compensated for all their sufferings by the joys of total domination or of total community or of both together; a world purified of all evil and in which history is to find its consummation - these ancient imaginings are with us still.” ― Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages

“...the working classes—that motor of social transformation which Marx increasingly stipulated for the role of the proletariat; the dispossessed and alienated revolutionary vehicle of his early writings, which later became defined and analysed into the collective worker who 'owner' nothing but his labour power—chains rather than assets. In the event, the working class actually came to fulfill most of the optimistic prognoses of liberal thinkers; they have become largely 'socialized' through access to privilege, consumption, organization, and voting participation, as well as obtaining massive social benefits.

They have become supporters of the status quo—not vociferous perhaps, but tacit approvers and beneficiaries none the less. The ferment today comes from sections of the community to whom political and social thought has never hitherto assigned any specific role; who have hitherto never developed specific political institutions of their own: youth, mostly students; racial minorities, a few dissident intellectuals—these form the new 'proletariat'.

The basis of their dissatisfaction is not necessarily and always an objective level of deprivation but rather a mixture of relative deprivation—consciousness of possibilities and of the blockages which prevent their attainment—and above all an articulate dissatisfaction with the society around them. There is no good reason why such groups should not form, and act like, a proletariat in a perfectly Marxist sense. The economic causality collapses; the analysis of a decaying bourgeois society and the determination to overthrow it remain.

The growth of revolutionary fervour in individual participants and its spread to ever wider sections of the population must primarily be the result of struggle itself, not the distillation of thought or the prescription of correct ideology by others."

― J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I

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A striking feature of Marx’s writing is his hostility to Christianity and religion. For example, in the preface to his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1843) Marx wrote:

"‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions’."

Although Marxism has failed as a political and economic system, ironically it flourishes as a secular religion. Perhaps Marxism ought to be regarded as the crack cocaine of the Left.

Just a few days after the bicentenary of his birth, historian GORDON LUCY recalls the life of the revolutionary communist whose doctrine still enjoys great prestige in academia despite evidence that it leads to repression, totalitarianism and the deaths of millions.

Near Alexanderplatz in what was once East Berlin there is a double statue of Karl Marx sitting and Friedrich Engels standing.

Only dating from 1986, fervent East German communists were outraged by the memorial’s ‘lack of heroic militancy’ and complained bitterly that the founders of ‘scientific socialism’ were depicted as two OAPs.

After German unification in 1990, graffiti artists spray-painted it with the slogan, ‘Next time it will be better.’ Given the millions of deaths and human misery for which Marxism has been responsible, let us hope there never will be a next time.

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We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism.

Clay Routhledge

“Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.” ― Paul Johnson

“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it. When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had “capitalism” as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice.

The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible. Left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized.

In a moment of doubt about the socialist record Eric Hobsbawm once wrote: ‘If the left have to think more seriously about the new society, that does not make it any the less desirable or necessary or the case against the present one any less compelling.’1 There, in a nutshell, is the sum of the New Left’s commitment. We know nothing of the socialist future, save only that it is both necessary and desirable. Our concern is with the ‘compelling’ case against the present, which leads us to destroy what we lack the knowledge to replace.

The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?

From this state of bewildered scepticism the student may take a leap of faith. And the leap is never backwards into the old curriculum, the old canon, the old belief in objective standards and settled ways of life. It is always a leap forward, into the world of free choice and free opinion, in which nothing has authority and nothing is objectively right or wrong. In this postmodern world there is no such things as adverse judgement – unless it be judgement of the adverse judge. It is a playground world, in which all are equally entitled tot their culture, their lifestyle and their opinions.

And that is why, paradoxically, the postmodern curriculum is so censorious – in just the way that liberalism is censorious. When everything is permitted, it is vital to forbid the forbidder. All serious cultures are founded on the distinctions between right and wrong, true and false, good and bad taste, knowledge and ignorance. It was to the perpetuation of those distinctions that the humanities, in the past were devoted. Hence the assault on the curriculum, and the attempt to impose a standard of 'political correctness' – which means, in effect, a standard of non-exclusion and non-judgement – is also designed to authorise a vehement kind of judgement, against all those authorities that question the orthodoxy of the left.

By seeing society in class terms we are programmed to find antagonism at the heart of all the institutions through which people have attempted to limit it. Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty – these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us. It is in terms of them that we attempt to articulate the fundamental togetherness that mitigates social rivalries, whether of class, status or economic role. Hence it has always been a vital project on the left, to which Hobsbawm made his own distinctive contribution, to show these things are in some way illusory, standing for nothing durable or fundamental in the social order.

Those who imagined, in 1989, that never again would an intellectual be caught defending the Leninist Party, or advocating the methods of Josef Stalin, had reckoned without the overwhelming power of nonsense. In the urgent need to believe, to find a central mystery that is the true meaning of things and to which one’s life can be dedicated, nonsense is much to be preferred to sense. For it builds a way of life around something that cannot be questioned. No reasoned assault is possible against that which denies the possibility of a reasoned assault.”

― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

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