I often turn on C-Span’s Washington Journal while I eat breakfast. Lately, a number of call-in’s warn listeners about Obama being Marxist. With soaring anger, they paint a doomsday scenario.
I love it! A favorite picture pops up on my mental screen. The four of us are smiling into the camera, packs on our backs ready to hike the fifty mile Isle Royale National Park trail. Five year old K2’s pack contains clean clothes, rain parka, water bottle, daily ration of gorp trail mix and a doll. Eight year old K1’s pack has all this personal stuff (paperbacks swapped out for doll) plus her sleeping bag and some of the cooking gear. Mom’s pack has all this plus the tent and a chunk of our food supply. Dad carries the rest. The ten day hike was not all moonlight campfires and sunny daisy fields. There were rainy days and bumps and scrapes along the way, but we had a wonderful adventure.
Each carried according to their capacity so we could all enjoy food and shelter. This Marxist idea worked out well for us.
I laugh out loud when these doomsayers suggest that Obama ought to take all the stimulus money and give a million dollars to every working family to buy their house and whatever. Precisely the idea Karl Marx dreamed up.
Poor Karl! In real life he was a quiet, relatively obscure scholar. Born in Prussia, he was a staff writer on a Paris newspaper when he published his Manifesto in 1848. He moved to London and spent the rest of his life in the library of the British Museum writing about his vision.
He saw a world dominated by rich oligarchs counting their gold in manor houses while their workers lived in deprivation. His fix was simple if utopian. ‘From each according to their ability. To each according to their need.’
Sound a bit like Christ’s; ‘What you do unto the least, you do unto me’?
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Marx’s idea was hugely popular. In response to the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution, egalitarian communes sprang up all over the USA.
For fifty years, my wife and I enjoyed Oneida Commune silverware on our dinner table. We spent delightful weekend family meetups in the Amana Colonies.
Last time I checked – a few minutes ago on the net – The International Directory of Communities listed 1627 egalitarian communes thriving in the good old USA.
We live in a funny old world!
