[americandream]

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/class ... festo.html

[timmac]

OMG not this crap again AD, come on now Ronald Reagan killed communism, it just has not been buried yet..

Famous speech from Ronny...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8

[threadbear]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'T')he bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.



http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/class ... festo.html

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', 'O')MG not this crap again AD, come on now Ronald Reagan killed communism, it just has not been buried yet..

Famous speech from Ronny...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8

[PrestonSturges]

OMG, dub over Reagans speech in Spanish, but add English subtitles........


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Keith_McClary', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', 'O')MG not this crap again AD, come on now Ronald Reagan killed communism, it just has not been buried yet..

Famous speech from Ronny...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8

[timmac]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Keith_McClary', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', 'O')MG not this crap again AD, come on now Ronald Reagan killed communism, it just has not been buried yet..

Famous speech from Ronny...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8

[americandream]

You need to read Marx's comments carefully Timmac and consider their import at a time when globalisation and it's effects (such as NAFTA, the WTO and the flight of American free capital to nominally Communist China to name a few developments) defy the sensitivities of the vast bulk of Americana and in fact fly in the face of the national mood.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Keith_McClary', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', 'O')MG not this crap again AD, come on now Ronald Reagan killed communism, it just has not been buried yet..

Famous speech from Ronny...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8

[timmac]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'Y')ou need to read Marx's comments carefully Timmac

[americandream]

I day trade and am probably the epitome of capitalist entreprise. We do what we do and capitalism does what it does.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'Y')ou need to read Marx's comments carefully Timmac

[timmac]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'I') day trade and am probably the epitome of capitalist entreprise. We do what we do and capitalism does what it does.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'Y')ou need to read Marx's comments carefully Timmac

[americandream]

The alternative I suppose is to meekly acquiesce to indifferent employment which may well be in China tomorrow, out of some misplaced understanding of Marxist dialectics.

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'I') day trade and am probably the epitome of capitalist entreprise. We do what we do and capitalism does what it does.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'Y')ou need to read Marx's comments carefully Timmac

[americandream]

Nothing would give me greater pleasure than being a hypocrat (?) and taking down the corporate bumboys on the far right. Vermin!

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pretorian', '
')no, they are just hypocrats, every last one of them.

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'N')othing would give me greater pleasure than being a hypocrat (?) and bla bla bla
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pretorian', '
')no, they are just hypocrats, every last one of them.

[americandream]

Why thank you corporate bla bla bla.

[timmac]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

[rangerone314]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', 'O')MG not this crap again AD, come on now Ronald Reagan killed communism, it just has not been buried yet..

Famous speech from Ronny...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8

[rangerone314]

I think communism is a sucky religion, but so is unlimited free market capitalism.

I think corporations should not have corporate personhood or any rights (including free $peech) that individuals have and I think there should be some sort of size limit so their power does not exceed a certain level or concentration of power.

I like small businesses, even if they can be ruthless in their own ways sometimes.

[americandream]

Marx's critique of capitalism has less to do with returning to some primitive socialism, as if we have ever had the ability to undo history, which we do not. The Industrial Revolution has added to our collective memories in ways that only extinction will undo.

So a dialectic view of history has less to do with embracing a simplistic utopian model from the past and more with identifying the inherent tendencies within capitalism and their natural effects. A little like examining the effects of a nasty addiction as the will to survive rises to the fore.

Take the ongoing and socialised oil disaster in the Gulf for example as well as the recent socialised financial bailout of a devoutly private capital. Both effects borne out of the bubble like tendency in capitalism. What these two events do is throw into sharp relief capitalism's cyclical tendencies as with each new bubble rise forces increasingly antithetical to the next bubble and so on and so forth.

Our individual preferences in all of this are as relevant as were the efforts of the individual Luddites as the fuedal era drew to a close, or for that matter and more recently, our individual efforts as voters in orchestrating change by means of the vote. This process is organic.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.