Marx 2011

It SEEMS like fun and games, but look where it ends...

Bruce at Gin and Tacos talks about how the police response to Occupy Wall Street is fundamentally different from the response to the Tea Party, despite the fact that Teatards routinely came armed and carrying threatening signs.  The guy who showed up with an assault rifle at a Presidential event was watched very closely.  The Lefty with a camera was maced in the face.

He goes on to say that this is a perfect Marxist moment: the foundations of the state are about funneling wealth to the top and everything else exists to support the foundation (oddly, he doesn't use those Marxist terms) and that include the police, obviously.

I fund trustafarians and Marxists tiresome (when you can even find the latter these days).  The Marxist dialectic, however, is an interesting way to look at history.  But Marx looked at Industrial Capitalism and saw revolution coming, to be followed by State Socialism.  Instead, the competition between the two created Social Democracy, with its regulation of industry and social safety net.

And that new movement - a mellowing of capitalism, red in tooth and claw - forestalled any true Marxist revolutions.  Russia and China were largely agrarian countries, not suited to any sort of true Marxist revolution of an urban proletariat.  In the truly urban, industrial countries of the West, Social Democracy - even its diluted form in the US - helped keep Marxism from ever being more than a fringe movement.

But with the end of the ideological conflict between Marxism and Capitalism (and I guess Democracy), Capitalism has basically spent the last two decades looking for opportunity to claw back the gains made for the, well, proletariat by the welfare state.

If we continue down this path, Marx's view of revolution becomes plausible for the first time since 1936.  You can't stagnate the bottom 90% and have them maintain their faith in the social contract.  Not if that social contract does not serve them.

Social mobility is disappearing, wealth is funneled upwards and democracy is increasingly auctioned off to the highest contributor.

It won't come soon, and hopefully won't come at all.  But if the powers that be don't start adjusting their behavior, it's not impossible to think that it could happen.

That's not a little chilling.