The Idiot Manifesto

I had the great, er, 'pleasure' of reading Marx and Engel's infamous Communist Manifesto for history class today, and boy was it everything I thought it would be. Stupid, unrealistic, laughable, and hopelessly illogic would perhaps be the most appropriate words.

I must say I truly enjoyed how Marx planned this 'revolution'. Everyone would, voluntarily, just throw away everything, start over and create the real Utopia. Forget old family traditions, any religious values, anything and everything you ever believed or stood for (It's all a slick plan by the Bourgeoisie anyways) and "UNITE." Um, reality check, anyone? Yea that's just going to happen, everyone is just going to throw away the religion and values they've had for hundreds of years because, you swear, in your little 25 page paper, that it's all just a big conspiracy? A wise man once said "You can fool some people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time," too bad he became President 12 years after Marx wrote the Manifesto - Karl could've used the advice.

I also loved how he talks about freeing the oppressed, but at the same time wants to take everything away from the Bourgeoisie. Equality for everyone, except those who used to be in charge: screw them. What ever happened, in this little document, to the rights of the Upper-class? Marx may not like them, but they're people too.

I also was intrigued at how Marx never states what he feels are the rights of individuals. Through reading him, one gets the picture that he believes people have a right to a good job, but that seems to be about it. In fact, he arbitrarily decides that people don't have the right to private property, but he never even attempts to refute the rationale of Locke. This is a crucial point in Marx's 'rationale,' because the right to Private Property in Capitalistic societies is clearly derived from the philosophy of Locke and others like him; thus in order to prove that Capitalistic Private Property is incorrect, Marx would need to disprove the reasoning of Locke.

Next, I was shocked by how completely counter-intuitive his conclusion was. He spends pages and pages telling the reader how selfish, individualistic, etc. man has become through Capitalism. In essence, he proves that mankind can be naturally selfish. So logically, the best system would be one that ignored this observation altogether and had man simply put aside his selfishness for the good and betterment of all. What?? The reason communism has failed, and always will fail, is that it totally ignores the nature of human beings. All it takes to disrupt a communistic system is one person, who wants to achieve more; because that person then works harder or does some other thing to gain an advantage over all the rest. Then all the rest become envious and struggle to themselves achieve the same advantage. Surely Marx isn't stupid enough to believe that everyone in the world will just willingly remain egalitarian. But then again......

Finally, of course, is how magnificently unrealistic Marx's theories are, as we are able to see through the implementation of communism in various places. Russia was able to murder more innocent people than the civilized world ever thought possible, thanks to communism. They were able to produce one of the most backward, underachieving and oppressive economies of all time. Furthermore, communism allowed the peoples of Eastern Europe and the USSR to be deprived of human liberties for over 70 years. In China, communism allowed Mao to weasel his way into the history books as one of the most ruthless dictators of all time, bar perhaps Stalin and Hitler. And in Vietnam, as well as in modern China, communism has been so successful that both Nations find their economies becoming more and more capitalistic every day. And let's not forget that communism has produced super-nice-guy Fidel Castro too.

Indeed, it seems that Ronald Reagan was, as usual, dead on when he dissected the difference between communists and non-communists. As per the Great Communicator: "How do you tell a communist? It's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. How do you tell an anti-communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."