For all you(we) Yanks & other You-Ess-ians

[beagle]

As the UK is (was until that terrible Grantham cow) near the front of the inevitable march from feudal state to proletarian utopia...

Ah, this is where our recollections differ slightly. Even leaving aside flares and platform heels, 70s Britain didn't strike me as obviously Utopia-bound.  Unless we use Churchill's "Equal bearing of miseries" definition. Mind you, decline and decadence can be fun too

Nice to know historical inevitability is alive and well though, even if it does take a breather every decade or so.

[goat starer]

(the problem is that I'm not sure if you would like to be associated with those from whom I heard those words back home*).

probably reactionary police spies discrediting and delaying the inevitable rise of the proletarian communistic internartional consensus! 

Ah, this is where our recollections differ slightly. Even leaving aside flares and platform heels, 70s Britain didn't strike me as obviously Utopia-bound.  Unless we use Churchill's "Equal bearing of miseries" definition. Mind you, decline and decadence can be fun too

over such short timescales the death throes of the capitalist hegemony may appear to produce periods of degeneration in the inevitable historic progress towards the common good. As every scientific historian is no doubt aware the move to a communist stage will only occur through revolution. Any temporary alliance between bourgeois and proletarian to overthrow previous modes of production (ie. Britain post 1945) only hastens the degeneration of the borgeois imperialist state (Britain 1979-2007) precipitating the revolutionary explosion that will sweep aside and render redundant all previous modes of production (ie. Britain 2008).

I really can't see what is so hard to understand 

[Pachyderm]

Duz 'at mean Oi'll 'ave more or less ter plunder?

Oi'ze nat yer edumacated type, see. Oi can tell won end o' boat from anudder, most o' the tyme (One's pointy, see, an' one ain't), but there ain't much Marxist litterature out at sea. Only gets used fer one thing, litterature, an' you bein' a man o' letters an' such, wouldn't be best askin, if ye gets me drift....

[beagle]

I have the same problem. I'm waiting for someone to publish "The Tory Duffer's Guide to Marxism".
When it comes to communist theory I never really got beyond us being British and them being excitable foreigners wearing fur hats.

[Griffin NoName]

Wasn't it one for all and all for one ?  Or was that something else?

[goat starer]

no... its the one that goes.....

Manifesto
of the Communist Party
1848


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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: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.



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I -- BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS [1]

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The history of all hitherto existing society [2] is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master [3] and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.........

etc.......

although in the proper translation the 'spectre' is something more like 'hobgoblin'

[Griffin NoName]

d'Artagnan's version was shorter.

[Pachyderm]

Dear God,

all that AND published in Flemish?

No wonder they lost...

[beagle]

Yep. Wrong language and a misunderstanding of what we proles want.
Here's my own modest reworking in txt msg speak.

  "wrkrz of d wrld revolt. washn machines n leathA sofas 2B 1."

[Pachyderm]

Leather is bourgeoisie, and you should be perfectly happy hand washing your clothes in the communal tub. The Party says so. Any dissent with The Glorious Leader, and you will be sent to the Hebrides.

[beagle]

I could definitely live with that, but a Goat gulag is more likely to involve a distillery-less rainy moor, flat caps and whippets.

[Pachyderm]

The People's Republic of Yorkshire?

Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics of The Dales?

[goat starer]

The shipley autonomous oblast

Beagle you are not a prole and what you are describing is exacly what Marx describes. The proletariat are convinced that what they need is leather sofas by the borgeois state (and Bourgeois rectionaries masquerading as proles). Inevitably they realise the depth of the con in the end......

REVOLUTION!

[beagle]

Let me know if happens while I'm out won't you?  If it means an end to those irritating DFS and Ariston adverts then it may not be too bad.

If you use the old definition of the proletariat (those with callouses on their hands through manual labour) then each prole is going to get a lot more callouses stringing up all the service sector workers.

[Griffin NoName]

Is this the 4th July thread?