All Roads

by Stephen Fleischman

Who was it that said “All roads lead to Socialism”?

Was it that German guy with the full head of hair and the bushy beard? The guy, who, with his friend, Freddy Engels, spent a lot of time at the British Museum in London, in mid-Nineteenth Century, studying the results of this new thing called capitalism that mushroomed out of the Industrial Revolution in England?

Yes, it was. And it was the same two guys who wrote “The Communist Manifesto”, published in 1848, which said “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. The bushy-bearded German was a man, both praised and reviled, by the name of Karl Marx. He also wrote a book called “Das Kapital” (“Capital” as in Capitalism) that analyzed that system, as it was at that time, and predicted where it would go.

The main thesis of Marx’s book is that the capitalist system, in a new mercantile world growing out of feudalism, is based on the exploitation of one class by another and that the main drive of the capitalist is to maximize his “profits.”

There are many ways of explaining where profits come from and the capitalist has used them all—his entrepreneurship, his land, his factory, his machines, his technology. All subterfuges.

Every workingman knows that profit is derived from the sweat of his brow. It is the surplus value created by labor in the process of production. And that’s the only place it can come from. In effect, capitalism is based on the theft of labor power from the workers by the owners of the means of production. Wow! Why wasn’t something done about that?

Another of Marx’s predictions—capitalism leads to monopoly through mergers and acquisitions of capital enterprises. And monopoly capitalist states, vying for raw materials and markets, resort to imperialist wars. (we’ve certainly had a long string of those).

In the end, Marx says, the contradictions of capitalism will bring it down. It will “dig its own grave”.

There you have it. I think we’re in the grave digging stage right now.

The corporate infrastructure in the United States has become so powerful; the government hardly makes a move without its consent.

The corporate oligarchy that runs this country is made up of various segments of capital within the infrastructure as well as high ranking government officials, members of Congress, parts of academia, and other elements within the society. The mainstream media, mostly owned by five major corporate conglomerates, controls most of what we see, hear, and read.

Corruption within the infrastructure is pervasive. Need we mention Blagojevich and Madoff, for starters? Just about every elected politician is in one corporate pocket or another. The political system is fueled by campaign contributions. Politicians need money to get elected and the special interests that give it to them gets a quid pro quo. Everybody knows that’s the way the system works.

Alexander Cockburn of the Internet’s Counterpunch (12-14-08) reports “The Washington Post congratulates Obama for steering clear of the slime of Chicago politics, but what actually happened is that Obama moved to richer pastures… campaign contributions from the Pritzkers, the Crown family, the big ethanol interests in the Midwest, the nuclear industry, Wall Street financiers, the biggest of big time money, now gratefully acknowledged in the form of Obama’s cabinet appointments. Obama raised more money than any presidential candidate in the history of American politics, and here we are getting excited about Rod Blagojevich?”

Barack Obama, our president-elect, crawled out of the Milton Friedman den at the Chicago school of economics where economists still exhorted laissez-faire and deregulated capitalism going back to Adam Smith. “I’m a market man,” Obama chortled when he threw his hat into the ring.

After a year in recession, the country is well on its way to an apple sale. The cookie is beginning to crumble, the economy out of control—unemployment and foreclosures shooting up, purchasing power spiraling down. Pretty soon we’ll be looking like the “Great Depression” of the 1930s, only worse. Most of the MSM and their pundits are predicting it, even the media whores.

How do we fix it? Everybody’s got a plan we know won’t work.

The buzz word is “bail out”. They are using our taxpayer money, our national treasury, to bail out failing Wall Street firms to the tune of $700 billion. President-elect Barack Obama joined the hunt. President Bush, the decider, and his Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, can’t decide on how to do it. Bush is talking now of diverting some of that money to bail out the auto industry—GM, Ford and Chrysler, the pillars of our manufacturing resources, on the eve of destruction. To save them from collapse, we must fork over $14 billion, just for starters.

To secure these loans, the failing companies will turn over shares of their stock to the government. We are becoming part owners of these companies! Members of the bourgeoisie! Is that socialism sneaking in the back door?

On January 20th, 2009, with right wing bigot and evangelical fundamentalist, Pastor Rick Warren reading the invocation—the first voice of the Obama Administration, Barack is going to find a big dump on his new desk in the Oval Office.

Obama has already let us know that he is preparing an humungous stimulus package to save the country. Everybody knows it won’t work.

As the economy spirals downward, as the pundits have predicted, we will see more corporations and industries in need of bailouts and take-overs by government.

That’s nationalization, isn’t it? Also called “socialism”.

That’s the easy way. The other way is revolution.

As the man with the beard said, “All roads lead to Socialism”.

Advertisement