Institutionalized Sloth
The Cossack: Where Free People Reign
“From he according to his ability, to he according to his need”
There is a significant, growing following of Marxism or related political ideas of Communism and Socialism among America’s youth. This is certainly occurring among college educated young people, as the universities have propagandized to America’s youth. I have read the Karl Marx seminal work, the Capital, to understand his main arguments, as well as read or viewed both explanations and critiques of his work. I have visited countries from the former Soviet Bloc that have adopted their own form of Marxism, in the Leninist form.
Much has been written in support of or in opposition to Marxism. I will not repeat these critiques or affirmations, they have certainly been outlined and discussed in a plethora of books and articles. However, to get a deeper understanding of a movement, it is important to understand the man who put forth the argument. An understanding of the Marx’s worldview, how he grew up and his personal experiences assist in the understanding of the genesis of the ideas.
Karl Marx was born into a family of relative wealth in Prussia. He was a dedicated family man and loving husband to his wife Jenny. They had 7 children, but only 3 made it to adulthood, somewhat attributed to the life that Marx created for his family. Throughout his life, the results that he delivered to family was one of expulsion (from Paris in 1845 and Brussels in 1848) for “dangerous” political speech and a relative radical for the time. His final residence was in London, where he wrote the first volume of Das Kapital (The Capital) with his friend Friedrich Engels.
Another result that Marx delivered to his family was financial insecurity. During his lifetime, Marx received an inheritance from his parents, his wife, Jenny, received an inheritance from her relatives and borrowed money from his good friend, Friedrich Engels. Marx did not earn enough money for himself and his family from the newspapers and other endeavors. He outsourced blame for his situation to the “bourgeoisie”. Apparently, he rarely took personal accountability for his family’s economic woes.
It makes me wonder if Marx’s inability to manage money, plus his unwillingness to work, beyond intermittant feeble attempts at starting newspapers, were the seeds of his grand mosaic of communism. Did Marx actually envision the self destruction of capitalism that would naturally occur over time, or was Marx’s theories a thoughtful response to his own unwillingness to be productive? Marx was certainly educated, and while he was an average student, he should have been better off financially than he was as others were at the time.
If one looks at the those who are involved in organizing events that tilt towards communism or socialism, the natural state of the organizers are those who rarely have jobs. Generally, as in the case of the Occupy Wall Street protests that went on for months, protests are contained by people who don’t work or, perhaps, want to refrain from productive work to protest a system based on people having to work to get ahead. Marx’s situation in the middle of the 1800’s seems to get repeated today: rich people finance protesters who desire a system where work is no longer required.
The problem becomes real when protests turn into government action. It is a reasonable position to hold that the rich can consenually support any legal activity, including the financial support of protestors. The problem comes when people are forced, through taxation and welfare systems and presidential give aways such as student loan forgiveness, to pay for others who do not want to be financially accountable. Government tends to pander to the visible - protestors, violent extremists and others making a statement about victimhood and oppression, but tends to take from the invisible - the thousands who make products, perform services, and own companies. Those who work are less visible, but produce the resources that government can take and give to those who consume resources and are visible to politicians.
In a society with these incentives, the populations of the visible will grow. Incentives come in many names: welfare, bail outs, government subsidies, safety nets, loan forgiveness, minimum wages, but they are all similar in that they take from the invisible to generally give to the visible. Politicians fund the visible at the expense of the invisible. We have seen what this has done in Europe: Germany with its migrants, Sweden with its welfare state, France with its pensioners. All of these seem destined to fail in the absence of reform. The capitalist experiment only works when the maximum number of people participate. Politicians’, particularly, but not exclusively on the left, have an inexorable desire to be popular with the visible. The institutionalization of laziness is a short run strategy to get elected by feeding the parasite, but destroys the economic host.
If one is looking for a hero, look at the life they have lived. It makes sense to consider the the seeds of their worldview.
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