Bourgeois Marxism and Folk Marxism

Recently, via Ed Driscoll and Stacy McCain, there’s been new attention (in the context of Occupy) to a pair of 5 year old essays by Arnold Kling about “folk Marxism”, that is, the set of working assumptions shared by the general populace that have their roots in the work of Karl Marx.  I’ve had a nearly-congruent concept called “bourgeois Marxism”, so named because one needs to have a certain level of education and income to subscribe to it, and because believers in bourgeois Marxism are nice people who totally ignore the violence required to implement even the mildest of Marxist proposals. They’ll deny that they’re Marxists because they don’t believe in the gulag, yet they are perfectly fine with prison for de jure economic crimes.  They’ll support income redistribution while visiting the entertainments who advertise in the local so-called “alternative newspaper”, even though those businesses rely on surplus income to survive.  ”Folk Marxism” is, I think, a broader category in that it deals with fundamental cultural memes more than actions in the world.

Kling mostly focuses on class warfare as a chief manifestation of folk Marxism. But us vs. them has always existed; it’s just that in former times, the nation and the domestic society was always us instead of them, but to the folk Marxist, the United States is them. (to the extent that “the United States” is coterminous with its government, I may share more folk Marxism than I think).  But the manifestations reach deeper, into fundamental moral assumptions about fairness, and broader into Marxism, into the points of the Communist Manifesto.

To take one example, consider #2 of the 10 demands of the Manifesto: “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. ”  Most Americans believe that a “fair” tax system involves taking a higher percentage of income from “the rich” than from “the poor” (however we define those terms). Both American political parties accept this; Republicans believe that the tax rate of the rich should not be too high, as it might squelch economic growth, while Democrats believe that economic growth is created by the poor having lots of money from the rich to spend. Even the so-called Fair Tax accepts that the poor get a break. In either case, it’s a pragmatic rather than a moral argument, and pragmatically, if you want power, you have to go where the money is. When asked why it is “fair” that the rich pay more, most people, if they don’t lapse into silence or total incoherence, will argue that it’s because “the rich CAN pay more, and they won’t miss the extra money. ” But values are individual, and you cannot know what another human being will miss.

Further, we don’t normally use capacity as a measure of justice. If I gave the eldest of my granddaughters a bigger piece of cake because she’s bigger, her stomach is bigger, and she could eat more, the others would object. We don’t, in this country, adjust speeding tickets to the driver’s income, as they do in Finland.  We do treat the mentally impaired with leniency in criminal proceedings, but that’s an issue of moral competence rather than fiscal capacity.

So why not the same percentage of income? Oh, that would be too tough for the poor. But we could make it a low enough rate so that the poor could pay. The arguments against that are pragmatic, not moral; we’d have to have a much smaller government. For that matter, if government is a service that we purchase, why not charge an absolute dollar amount? We don’t charge the rich more for a steak; that would be totally impractical. Yes, some services are sold on a sliding scale, but it’s not more for the rich, it’s less for the poor, and it’s up to the poor to prove that they’re worth of the break. It’s charity, not an issue of fairness. We’d have to charge even less for government then. But it would be fair.

It seems that whenever I have ever challenged anyone on a basic assumption rooted in Marxism or other forms of collectivism, they slither away without addressing the issue.  In this society, I’ve not had that liberty. They shouldn’t either.

Santorum

Mike Soja doesn’t believe in comboxes, so I have to comment here. He writes about a weird mislinkage to a story about Rick Santorum’s “Google problem”, and accuses Dan Savage or his followers of Google-bombing Santorum. I don’t think it quite happened that way. Savage appended Santorum’s surname to a byproduct of anal sex that nobody had ever bothered naming (probably because it’s pretty disgusting), and the term took off, leading to Google use to search the word.  A lot of people read the bourgeois Marxist tabloids that Savage’s column appears in…not just liberals. Indeed, I can’t think of Santorum without thinking of santorum…which I would really rather not think about.  It’s a brilliant piece of Alinskyism. Nobody deserves to have his name dragged through shit like that. But Rick Santorum probably comes as close as anyone can. And there really isn’t jack he can do about it either, as anything he could say would just weld the concepts closer together.

“I was listening to – forgive the expression – an NPR reporter”

Apparently Ms. Deathmountain had a conniption when she realized that, in doing her reporterly duty by calling a spade a spade, she was going to have to use the “c-word” (and no, not the one that gives normal women conniptions).

People talk about this “war on Christmas”. It’s not a war; if it were, there’d be fighting back, and casualties on both sides.  It’s not a war; it’s an edit. The term slowly and thoughtlessly leaves our vocabulary. Much of everyday speech is a parroting back of what we hear. We tend not to speak the same big words that we use when writing, because nobody else does. We pick up a little of the accent when speaking with somebody who speaks accented English. And mindlessly, even if we’re Christians, we say “happy holidays”, because that’s what anyone else says, anymore. The only difference with Totenberg’s crowd is that they think the words are important enough to give offense, and to apologize for. Most of us don’t care even that much.

Y’all want to fight a war for Christmas? Quit wishing people “Merry Christmas” when it’s not December 25. Wish them “Happy Advent”. That’s what it is, and they need to be reminded. If God is going to come to earth, they’d better be ready — especially when it happens again. If they don’t have a concept of Advent (and even many Christians don’t), they’ll have to think about it, which is a Good Thing. If they take Advent seriously, they will take Christmas seriously. Afterwards, you can use “Happy Christmastide” for the Twelve Days. Yes, there are other times to remember in there, but “Happy St. Stephen’s Day” or “Happy Holy Innocents” or “Happy Bris of Jesus Holy Name” is too much too soon, and might tend to harsh their seasonal mellow. Being hit the day after with gift returns at your retail job and being hit with rocks until you die are not exactly the same thing.

And to all of you, happy Holy Days and a merry Christ Mass. (though what Mass isn’t a Christ Mass?)

Boris Johnson defends Latin in schools

….against the Labour ass Ed Balls (only in England, a name like that):

What would [formidable Marxist historian] Ste Croix have made of a government that actively tried to restrict the study of a great and profitable discipline to the bourgeoisie? He would have denounced it as an act of class war, and he would have been right.

Is our children learning?

If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

That’s the president of the Detroit School Board, folks.

Brainiac?

Malone, pithy and devastating, on the President’s intelligence:

I’ve never seen any evidence of that, at all. Extremely intelligent? Extremely modest intelligence, would be my rating of Obama’ s smarts. And very swift on the con. Driven by self-love and megalomania.

Obama’s a packaged product, and was always more hype than substance. One of the standards of extremely intelligent people is good judgement. Twenty years in Jeremiah Wright’s church kills that. Obama is an obfuscator and prevaricator. Bad character. Not too smart.

Intellectuals are experts in manipulation of words. Since they fancy themselves to be intelligent, they assume that intelligence “looks like” their verbal skill set.  Since Obama speaks crisply with few slip-ups, he is ipso facto intelligent. (as opposed to “potatoe” and “Is our children learning?” — and Joe Biden is, I would maintain, a special case) This effect is multiplied by “the soft bigotry of low expectations” multiplied by a contradiction in liberal thought: they can observe (because they have been castigated for making the observation) that Obama speaks better than most black people, but “black people” are equal to “white people”. Ergo, if Obama speaks better than other blacks who are equal to white people, then Obama is superior to everyone.

I’m not sure I want to totally buy into the “multiple intelligences” gobbledygook that educarats use to explain away their failures. But my wife, who admits to being a disaster with language, thinks for herself, can perceive reality clearly,  and is a better mechanic than I am.  Obama’s alternative skill-set, had he grown up in Africa without his education, would have made him a successful “solicitor” in your email, asking for your help in resolving a rich man’s estate.

How do you say “Naughtius Maximus” in Arabic?

Pontius Pilate: I have a vewy gweat fwiend in Wome called ‘Biggus Dickus’.

and apparently he’s just been rejected as Pakistani ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

“The name is not the thing” (Robert Anton Wilson, paraphrasing Korzybski)

I was speaking today to a high school teacher in an urban district far away from Black Water Farm, and she was discussing the problem Certain Ethnic parents have in naming their children. Apparently, it never occurs to these people that a name is something you carry around for life, that it has great bearing upon your future success, and that it requires more thought than naming a pet. This trend was referenced in John Ross’ Unintended Consequences, only there it was a cruel game played by white OB/GYN interns to encourage poor women to give their children names like Anus Brown, or the BATF agent G.G. Jackson (nee Gonorrhea Gaily). Apparently, mothers come up with these names all by themselves.

The more benign form seems to be oriented towards increasing self-esteem… name like Holy Kidd, or Precious. “My classes are filled with royalty : Princes, Princessess, Kings, Queens,” she said. Then there are the wacky, Zappaesque names, like the sisters “LehMONjelo” and “OrANjelo” (named after popular boxed desserts). Or the possibly ignorant, like “NoNAHmee” (or, as spelled on the birth certificate, “no name”)

But the worst case came when she was subbing in a class, calling roll. “I don’t know how to pronounce this name.” “It’s ShiTHAYD.” Yes, somebody had actually named their son Shithead. Yeah, there’s one for the boardroom. What’s the matter with you people!?

UPDATE: The Hillboyz talk about this in Cleveland:

“What’s her name?”.

“K-9Nia”.

“How do you say that?”

“Kuh-neen-eee-ya”, the woman behind the counter overemphasized, with the DUH! unspoken.

Of course, that’s how you pronounce a name that has both a hyphen and the number nine in it.

No wonder the kids at that school can’t read. Their own names make no sense, and have nines in them. How are they supposed to read “cat” and “dog” when they are looking for the numbers mixed with letters and hyphens?

Sign seen in a front yard

“Educators that sealcoat.”

I see why they’re moonlighting. But then, maybe educators really aren’t human.

Word police and Oxford children’s dictionaries

Via Breda, news that Oxford University Press has changed their children’s dictionaries in some alarming ways.

I’m actually of two minds of this. If a word is part of most people’s experience, you don’t have to explain it. What child doesn’t know what a blog is, or voicemail? But if Britain is truly multi-culti and post-Christian, then the church words become even more important, because they aren’t part of everyday experience for many youth, and they are such a part of the literary heritage. Is “fortnight” in there? (Made famous by Robinson Crusoe…and as a child I never understood what a “Popish prayer book” was…maybe “pop-ish”, like a missalette.)

As for the “country words”, plants and animals are hard to define. You can figure out by context that a buttercup is a flower, but if you’ve never seen one, it’s hard to get the picture. It’s a lack of nature literacy we’re discussing here, not one of words. Likewise, with all due respect to Breda’s sacred food, you know bacon, or you don’t. Is “fetayer” in there, or “kibbeh”? Just checking.

In short, this is more a symptom than a cause of Britain going downhill.