The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a lecture to the AFL-CIO in 1975 in which he said:
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 delicate); all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. This whole created being--man--is reduced to matter.
He told the crowd explicitly that communism is not an ideology based on a higher truth, that it can't be defended by any real argument, and that it has always openly been opposed to freedom, which can be seen, he noted, if anyone actually reads what Marx wrote.
So who would fall for it?
Apparently the AFL-CIO. No one in attendance that night must be around today because Richard Trumka signed and pledged the organization's support to the 99% Spring movement whose letter states that our collective suffering is a result of "rampant greed—the deliberate manipulation of our democracy and our economy by a tiny minority in the 1%, by those who amass ever more wealth and power at our expense."
Compare this to the sentiment plainly expressed in The Communist Manifesto of 1848:
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat... The bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway... It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in the place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom---Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The rhetoric of class warfare hasn't changed. How awful that, after everything the 20th Century showed us, people are still deceived.
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Aug '10
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
How awful that our president gave the nod to Mr Trumka to sign this document. How awful that it is part and parcel of the Presidential Campaign in 2012. How awful that Trumka's UMWA leadership saw the death of Eddie York while the memory of the Yablonski family deaths were still fresh.
But when most of the journalists and all of the academia are nodding in approval, these useful idiots probably don't even know what they're doing.
Jul '11
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
Victims, aren't we all? How pitiful a way to view the world, and dangerous as well.
Aug '10
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
George Meany must be spinning in his grave.
Mar '11
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
Maura Pennington:
The rhetoric of class warfare hasn't changed. How awful that, after everything the 20th Century showed us, people are still deceived.
They were in the 21st Century. 2008 to be precise.
The Democrats seem to be pinning their hopes on it still working in 2012. It's all they have left after losing the dog vote.
Oct '10
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
If there were a way to effectively juxtapose these two statements--graphically, I mean--this would be a great point to make in a TV ad. Very Breitbartian.
Nov '11
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
Thumbs up for this post.
Aug '10
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
I remember a leader of a Socialist party in opposition at the time in Ireland citing a famous saying when stating that his Party in Government would "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." They're in power now (with a larger and more centre-right Party, which in Irish terms means something like the Democrats) and they're certainly holding enthusiastically to the second part.However, I don't think anyone feels at all comforted, hence the precipitous drop in support for the Party.
Jul '10
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
That's why the left has to continuously revise history.
May '11
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
As always, Robert Heinlein said it best:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."
Jul '10
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
To see Trumka banging the drum of egalitarianism to halt the fading of his fortunes and reline his pockets to a degree far beyond those of ordinary mortals is deeply affecting. So much for lunch.
Sep '10
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
I no longer find it odd that those who attach themselves to the screw-the-rich bandwagon are inherently unhappy people who, finding no sustenance in their own being, must project outward, onto a blank, utopian screen that divides them from folks who have been saved from their own tendencies toward depression and life-loathing, myself by nurturing a genuine appreciation for what I have (the result of learning history and taking its lessons to heart). An example: six years ago, when my mother was planning to move to North Carolina to live with me in a home we rent, every liberal/leftist woman to whom I relayed this information (all with high-income jobs) frowned and, without fail—in horror—said: I could never do that. I would respond, yeah, I understand that, but you do know this means you're rich, right? Whereupon they looked both confused and annoyed and dropped the conversation. Only the woman who cuts my hair (the adopted mother of two kids with issues) said, her eyes lit up: How wonderful for you to have time with your mother before she goes. I wish things weren't this stark, but they just are.
Mar '11
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
All this has all happened before. All this will happen again.
We travel to the moon, we create new trinkets, we remold the surface of the Earth but the one eternal constant is humanity itself. We never change, for good or for ill.
Sep '10
Re: The Rhetoric of Class Warfare Still Deceives
Everything old is new again. Thanks Maura for your wonderful post. It is rare even on this good website to see a better made or more important comparison of the left leadership's thought processes.
And how many contributors could possibly spell Solzan...er...Solzen....er...Solzhe.... oh forget it.