WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! was the clarion call of the Marxist/Communist party.  Note the word WORKERS.  Marx’s entire philosophy hinged on the belief that the proletariat, the wage-slaves, from around the world would unite in one great revolution and create the ultimate Communist utopia.  There was no room for what we call “welfare” in his system.  He considered non-workers scum (his word not mine) and warned against this non-laboring class of people being swept up into the revolution as the hired thugs (his word, not mine) of a Reactionary Elite.

In Marxist philosophy, there are four words that you really have to key on: Proletariat, Bourgeoise, Capitalist, and Reactionary. 

The Proletariat were the workers, the wage-slaves, the field hands of the Bourgeoise elite.  Capitalists were the owners of the corporations, companies, and businesses that employed the Proletariat.  With Bourgeoise, think middle-class in today’s terms, lower-end capitalists, small business owners who employed a handful of people.  Reactionaries were people who wanted to keep and return to the society from which the Marxists were rebelling.

Reactionaries wanted to keep their serfs and wage-slaves; the Bourgeoise wanted to keep the business that lined their pockets with money and let them lead a good life; the Capitalists wanted to keep control of their corporations.

According to Marx, these three groups denied the Proletariat the right to receive the proper compensation for their labor.  For Marx, it centered around who owned the means of production.

Think of a company, any company that makes a Billion Dollars a year. Say they make a Widget.  The president of the company makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.  The company’s executives make huge amounts of money but not as much as the president.  And the workers who actually make the Widget get an hourly wage.  If there is a huge demand for Widgets in a particular year, the president and the executives all receive bonuses.  And the workers continue to make their hourly wage.

According to Marx, the people who actually made the Widget should receive the financial benefit not those at the top.  He argued that the Billion Dollars should be equally divided among ALL the employees in that company and not shared only at the top.  In his world, it was a sin that the Capitalists were living high on the hog off the blood, sweat, and tears of the common laborer.  It was the laborer who invested his heartbeats in making that Widget and therefore really owned the Widget and should reap the benefits from its sale.

Expanding that to the national and then the world level, since the Proletariat owned the means of production for everything, they should all share equally in the rewards for literally making everything.  Stop and think for a moment.  Is there anything that you use, wear or eat that is not made, handled, or grown by someone else?

Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity!  Marx raised the whole idea of Communism to a kind of religion, as well he should since he stole the whole idea from the Bible.  But wait, you say, Communism is atheistic.  There is no God in Communism.  Marx called religion the “opiate of the people”.  In the Communist Manifesto, he literally dismisses religion in one line as not worthy of even being discussed.  He had to because anyone who seriously read the Bible would see Marx was a fraud.  He took God’s plan for his chosen people and then substituted the State for God.  And with that substitution, he doomed Communism to failure.

What, you don’t believe me?  Acts 2:44-45 “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”

And

Acts 4:34-35 “Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.”  

Can someone say, “Commune?” 

The God of the Bible is a totalitarian who favors communism/socialism for His followers.  The first law is that God comes first in everything.  If you put God first, you almost automatically become a Communist.  You work to please God, not yourself.  You give God all that you make.  And since you have given all, God, who knows all, gives you back what you need.  And what do you need?  The Bible says, 1 Timothy 6:8 “And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.”.  Everything else is vanity.  Notice that the Bible didn’t say “with Chateau Briand and Gucci let us be therewith content.”  If you don’t believe me about all being vanity, read Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes 2:24 – There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.

Ecclesiastes 5:19 – Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him power to eat therefor, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labor; this is the gift of God.

And then there are all the verses about a man enjoying the fruits of his labor.  Grab a Concordance from the Library (when one opens again), or download a Bible App and search the words “fruit”, “labour”, “work” and their various variations and you will be shocked at how many talk about the laborer getting the full benefit from his labor:

Psalm 128:2 – For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.

Proverbs 14:23 – In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury.

But, as Marx supposed, how can a laborer enjoy the fruits of his labor if there is someone there to take them from him?  And then you have the nail-in-the-coffin (so to speak): 2 Th 3:10 – “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”  If you don’t work, you don’t eat.  Could you be any more Marxist than that?

If you read a biography of Marx, you will discover that he was a student of Fredrich Hegel’s philosophy and adopted his dialectical method to criticize established society, politics, and religion from a leftist perspective.  It was this dialectical method that led him to develop an abject dislike for organized religion which he blamed God for.  He, therefore, took what the Bible had to say about labor and took God out of the picture, substituting the State for God.  But he forgot about human nature, and that’s where non-God-Centered communism breaks down.  A person might feel moved to give ALL to God, like the poor woman who gave her two mites in Mark 12:42- “And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing”. But how many would feel so moved to give all to the State?  In a beautiful, altruistic world in some other matrix, maybe.  But not on earth then, or today.  Man is too in love with the seven deadly sins. 

Which brings us back to today’s Democratic Party and the Reactionary Elite.

To Be Continued…….

Written by Eric B. Ruark

The post The History of Politics appeared first on Dr. E.C. Fulcher, Jr..

From its inception in the 1830s, the Democratic Party was the party of big business.  I know, you are thinking that wait a minute, the Republicans have always been the party of big business.  Maybe 20^th Century big business, but not 19^th Century big business.  In the 19^th Century, what we consider the big business, today, still gleamed in their inventors’ eyes or fledgling companies just struggling to get the venture capital to get off the ground.  Railroads were regional and men like Cornelius Vanderbilt were working at monopolizing them.  But that was to come after the Civil War.

Prior to the Civil War, big business was cotton.  Cotton ruled the world and American Southern planters ruled cotton.  In fact, as people were beginning to contemplate a Civil War, the Southern politicians thought secession a done deal because they thought that England would not allow the supply of southern cotton to be disrupted to their mills.  If the English mills did not get southern cotton, the British economy would collapse.

Well, the dearth of southern cotton played right into the hands of a small number of wealthy mill owners.  Fearing a civil war in America, these men began growing cotton in Egypt along the Nile and in the blossoming British Raj in India.  What was once too expensive to import economically suddenly became the rage when Lincoln blockaded the southern ports and the supply of American cotton began to dry up.

This also allowed the British mill owners a chance to kill off their competition.  Much of Britain’s cotton products were produced by small, home industries.  When the supply of American cotton dried up, these small businesses went out of business and the workers had to leave their homes and go to the manufacturing centers looking for work.  These underpaid wage-slaves became the hunting ground for a new philosophy coined in Germany by a young man named Karl Marx.

Europe had one thing that America did not: a class-based society.  It was exactly the thing that the early Americans had run away from.  In America, a longshoreman like Cornelius Vanderbilt could work their way up the economic ladder and become one of the wealthiest men in the country by sheer force of will and fists.  In Europe, that would not be possible.  A man born in one social-economic class was fated to stay in that class.  Marx became preoccupied with an attempt to understand his contemporary capitalist mode of production, as driven by a remorseless pursuit of profit.  According to Marx, that profit was derived from the exploitation of the workers whom he called the proletariat.  (Think of the British cotton workers in the example above who lost their home businesses and then had to work for the men who had destroyed them.)  According to Marx, this class struggle would eventually lead mankind to Communism as the fairest and most equitable means of distributing the wealth earned from a class’s common labor.

During the course of the 19^th Century, the Marxist philosophy began to take hold among the down-trodden of Europe’s lower classes.  The most famous expression of his socialism was the Paris Commune of 1871 when a radical socialist, anti-religious and revolutionary government took control of the city of Paris when the French government collapsed during the Franco-Prussian war.  When France surrendered to Prussia and a new government was formed, the Paris Commune refused to recognize it.  Eventually, the new government sent in the French army and the commune came to a bloody end. 

Marx’s writings had a deep impact on those people who felt that the system had marginalized them, slipped them into categories from which they could not get out.  And there was no country where that was more apparent than in Russia.

Russia was ruled by the Tsar.  The Tsar was more than a king or an emperor.  He was the owner.  Basically, the Tsar owned Russia and everyone there lived there by his sufferance.  He gave out the property for the nobles to live on.  If the Tsar gave an estate, that estate included everyone and everything on it.  The people were not allowed to leave the estate without the owner’s permission.  It was a form of slavery that made America’s slavery look like a walk in the park.  Whereas many American states had laws as to the treatment of slaves, there were no such laws in Russia.  An estate owner could beat one of his serfs to death without consequence.  The Romanov family ruled Russia as Tsars from 1613 to 1917.

In 1917 there was a revolution in Russia, followed by a series of mini-revolutions and coups the result of which was the establishment of a Communist government under the control of a triumvirate, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.  When Lenin died, Stalin maneuvered for control and became the sole ruler in Russia.  Trotsky fled to Mexico where he was eventually assassinated. 

The Russian Revolution attracted many Americans.  Remember, this was the height of the Jim Crow period.  Racism was rampant.  Big business, Republican-style was King, Workers were being exploited and living in dirt poor conditions while the corporation owners were living in the mansions on top of Nob Hill.  Marx’s socialist ideas found a home with a small group of people who felt the need to rectify this exploitation.  Unions were formed and struck for fair wages.  At the Ford Motor Company, striking workers were machine-gunned by the Nation Guard which was established to keep this “Red” terror in check.

Coal miners struck.  Pullman train porters struck.  And all strikes were met with an iron fist.  Since the company owners tended to be Republican, their workers began to find a welcome mat spread for them with the Democratic Party.  As time went on and the 20^th Century progressed, more and more Marxist ideas became enshrined in Democratic platforms.  Minimum wage.  Fare wage.  Social Security. Workers had rights.  Workers had the right to be protected.  Workers had the right to safety measures.  Then in 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt created the first National Welfare program that had nothing to do with workers, but rather with those who did not work.

And the exact thing that Marx warned against happened.  To Be Continued…

Written By Eric B. Ruark

The post The History of Politics appeared first on Dr. E.C. Fulcher, Jr..