Friday, March 26, 2010

The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, Joesph Engels Part 2

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. Part 2
The proletarian is a believing communist. Why that appellation? I copied the following from dictionary.com because I didn’t know either.
Word Origin & History
proletarian:1658 (n.), 1663 (adj.), from L. proletarius "citizen of the lowest class," in ancient Rome, propertyless people, exempted from taxes and military service, who served the state only by having children; from proles "offspring, progeny
After reading the definition, I still don’t really understand why Marx chose this title to represent the people. That must be in another book. They do not define Bourgeois in the book either except by identifying them as the oppressors of the Proletarian. Somehow, the Bourgeois rose like specters from the “ruins of the feudal society”. They are the instigators of class antagonism. In the dictionary, the Bourgeois is the middle class not the ruling class. Therefore, I am a little confused on the terminology. A quote from the Manifesto.
“The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relation; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
Apparently, Law, Morality, Religion, and family were made up by the Bourgeois to subjugate the Proletariat. They suggest the party “will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state”…
SOUND FAMILIAR? HEALTHCARE, TARP, STIMULUS!!!!
Finally, one last quote;
“Modern (ownership)of bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriation products, that is based on class antagonisms, and In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence; Abolition of private property. “
Part 3 is saving the best for last. The 10 points of the Communist take over.

No comments:

Post a Comment