Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [33]
In an absurd attempt to address the obvious fallacy of their post-feudalism, two-class construct, Marx and Engels describe bourgeois and proletariat subclasses, such as the petty bourgeois and weaker capitalists, who may even become wage earners, as well as the lower strata of the so-called middle class, including shopkeepers and tradesmen, etc. They are said to ultimately transition into the proletariat. As the subclasses increase the number of proletarians, bourgeois wealth increases and capital becomes more concentrated in fewer individuals. The proletarians work harder and become poorer.
Meanwhile, the never-ending capitalist pursuit of new technologies further impoverishes the proletariat. Eventually the middle class disappears, the proletariat rises up, and the bourgeois is vanquished—violently if necessary. Afterward, society is ruled by a dictatorship of the proletariat, which creates the conditions for the classless society. At some point, Marx and Engels predict, the state withers away. What is left is “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (43).
The likelihood that the ruling proletariat might break into factions and internal power struggles, with would-be masterminds competing for control over the society; or that it might spawn additional subclasses; or that once in a position to exercise absolute power a dictator or supreme party would voluntarily surrender their power and wither away, are not even addressed in The Communist Manifesto. To have done so, however, would have required Marx and Engels to once again acknowledge the hopelessness of their utopia. But this is the history and nature of communist governments. In the end, they are totalitarian regimes. What withers away are individual liberties and rights.
The impact of Marx and Engels on mankind has been enormous and devastating. Notwithstanding one hundred years of communist tyranny and mass genocide, the fanatics cling to their utopia. Any failure is in man and the men who bastardize communism—Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, et al.—not in the dogma. True communism, they argue, has never been faithfully executed. After all, as Marx and Engels preached, the workers’ paradise is inevitable.
The two-class economic construct, with one class of people perpetually victimizing another class of people, is both crude and defective. The history of man and the nature of individuals are more complex than the simplistic materialist construct of communism and its radical egalitarianism. Yet Marx and Engels invented them and assigned them more value than the individual, ensuring communism’s inhumanity. There is infinite diversity among the individuals within the so-called bourgeois and proletariat—not only economic but religious, social, geographical, political, etc. There are also differences in character traits among individuals—psychological, emotional, intellectual, moral, etc. Moreover, some degree of disunity among individuals within the classes would be natural, as would some degree of harmony and cooperation between individuals in the two classes. In the end, however, when and how are we to know when material equality has been achieved? How is it actually defined and measured and by whom?
As for Marx and Engels’s condemnation of capitalism, industrialization through capitalism would lead to economic progress that improved the lifestyles of tens of millions in Europe and North America. Advances were made in manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, technology, etc. New products and services improved upon existing ones. New skills were learned as new job opportunities became available. For most, their standard of living improved as they earned more and their material needs and wants became more affordable. In America, automobiles, homes or apartments, running water, flush toilets, electricity, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, stoves, microwaves, air-conditioning, washing machines,