#this is of course assuming he actually holds a hatred for communists. which one would assume given his whole schtick

[helios-two]

whether heavy is *actually* a communist or not is kind of irrelevant, because this implies that 1) soldier at least believes that heavy is a communist and 2) he doesn't seem to care. which is kind of fascinating

[byorder-fanfic]

Finn’s Lost Loves

Summary: Finn’s lost more than anyone else knew because of the war, and every stupid thing his family have done afterwards to keep themselves in charge.

Word count: 2019

Warnings: Mentions war and blood, talks about eating disorder, self harm and self-esteem, and homophobia (only a little bit, period accurate), a lot of toxic masculinity 

Author’s note: This is a lot of angst with little bits of fluff and a sad ending. Sorry. It’s basically an overview of Finn’s character, backstory and his relationships with the family that we’ve never gotten to see! It’s based off a piece of prose in my drafts, so if you guys like this, I might post that as well. Hope you enjoy, and please comment, I love hearing your opinions and any constructive criticism you might have xx

Finn loved books. Once upon a time, he really did. He loved the way Tommy did the voices, and Arthur made those wild motions with his hands, and John could always make him laugh as he told him about that thing that happened in the pub last week. He loved how Ada and Polly would tuck him up in bed, place a kiss on his temple and read the letters from the boys. Then they came back, and he didn’t need to read letters. Or books. Or anything really. Soon, he didn’t even go to school. He just wanted to be with his brothers. Now they tell him to piss off more than they beg him to stay. Tommy and Polly scold him for not being able to read off the betting boards, and John makes everyone else laugh when he holds a big volume under Finn’s nose, so that everyone knew that Finn was still illiterate. Finn hates books.

Finn loved Church. He didn’t need Polly to drag him by the heels as he sobbed under the Virgin Mary’s stare like his brothers when he hopped, skipped and a jumped all his way down the road. He always sat by Isaiah, the two boys out-screaming each other in the hymns and seeing who Polly would scold first. He wore the crucifix everyday, and treated his rosary with all the sacred carefulness a six year old could manage. He loved the psalms and Jeremiah’s voice ringing through the streets and the way everyone was always together (even Charlie) on Sunday. Then he had to light candles, praying for his brothers’ safety that was only answered with their damnation as they dragged back blood and French mud into Watery Lane. Now he cries through the paper thin pages of a Bible and his only prayers are that the boys never see his tears. What did he have to cry about after all? He was never a soldier, but he should learn to be a man. Finn hates Church.

Finn loved healing. Ada dragged him along to her nursing classes and soon his only reason to come to Church was to learn how to tie bandages and fix up cuts and bruises. No one noticed his long absences- they either assumed he went to school still, or they were far too busy with the race tracks to care for the whereabouts of their youngest brother. But then he'd slipped up, and he'd never seen his brothers laugh so hard when he proudly told Polly he was going to be a nurse one day. Even his aunt and sister, usually the ones on his side, had to purse their lips together as Arthur roared out: "Hear that, Tom? We got ourselves a Nurse Shelby here! Want a dress and hat to go with it?" He told them all to fuck off and stamped out, but he didn't understand what he said that was so funny. When he asked Isaiah, who had just turned fourteen and starting to see Finn less and less, he just said that being a nurse was a woman's job. He didn't like being laughed at for being a girl, but he didn't know why. He still hoarded textbooks about anatomy and the like under his bed, tracing over the detailed pictures with his skeleton finger as he wished. And wished. And wished. And almost prayed that he could read the little ink words. When he found Arthur with another red line on his neck, he offered him some medicine to cure his big brother's blues, thinking just a bit of Tokyo would keep his brother here with him. No one asked why Finn was sad. Oh well, at least he could protect his brothers now. Finn hates healing. Finn loved food. Always the big eater in the Shelby household, he managed to always have a full stomach despite the poverty that reigned. He was a stickler for sweets, though, and as soon as he mastered the art of sneaking rings and wallets from unsuspecting strangers, he soon graduated to thieving lollipops and boiled sweets and even some toffees that he proudly deposited into his aunt's hand with a toothy grin. But the boys would look into his empty plate and his skinny frame and tell him he'd better watch out, soon he might actually have a shape under those bulky clothes. They always laughed, and he felt himself completely embarrassed at the dinner table. He dumped more sugar than milk into his tea and stole chips when they went to the seaside. He'd always offer to share, wanting to provide for them for once, but they'd tell him he was the one who needed it. He sees his ribs and the little vertebrae of his spine and wonders why can't he just be strong like his brothers. Even though he despises it, he picks up boxing to fill out his form. Maybe training with Isaiah was an extra benefit, but the older boy had long since talked to Finn on the regular, and made a point to laugh at him when he fell onto the floor. So, Finn graduated from second helpings of lunch and too-sweet tea to the sour delights of whiskey and cigarettes. Just like his brothers. Finn hates food. Finn loves his family. He loves Polly, the mother he never had, and will never feel like he does enough to repay her for his entire childhood. Then Michael came back, and soon there wasn't any chore lists on the downstairs table for someone to read out for him, or little check ups throughout the day as she makes sure he's okay. That was when he realised exactly why Polly raised him in her empty arms. He loves Arthur: his eldest brother, who used to lift him up on his shoulders and teach him to draw. Finn still has faded old pictures of galloping stallions (signed in block letters: A.W.S) slipped between the filled out pages of the sketchbooks he hides in his wardrobe. Then Arthur came back, with what everyone calls Flanders Blues, but no one explains, and Finn feels like he's losing his brother everyday when he comes back smelling like a brewery with blood on his fists. Finn loves Tommy. A father figure to him, the kind of man he wants to be when he grows up. But then Greta died and Tommy went to war, and the man who took him horse riding every weekend was gone, and this Tommy was colder. Finn loves John as the best friend he's ever had, always laughing together, giving sometimes useful advice and finding days to just spend time with each other. Despite John's bazillion kids, widowerhood, and then his new wife, he's always had time to spare for his little brother. John was the one who told him what bisexual was when he found Finn sobbing in his room, he was the one that took him to the doctor when he passed out from malnutrition, and he's the one that made him swear to never use razor blades on himself again. Finn loves Ada. He sees why Freddie calls her an angel, and used to love it when she pretended to take Finn to the library when in fact they were both slipping away to a Communist meeting, which would usually end up in Ada and Freddie slipping away and leaving Finn in the trusted supervision of leftist radicals that he happily chatted away to. Ada always took care of him, making sure he was never involved in the business (on either side) and telling him that being a soldier is a life sentence, not an honour. He lives because Ada keeps him safe and sane. Then Ada leaves. Finn hates the Shelby name that everyone screams at him like a condemnation, that invites slurs and hatred that only he gets because he doesn't look like a proper Shelby man. Finn hates his family. Finn loved Isaiah. A childhood crush that brought butterflies to his stomach and blushes to his freckled face. He sketched the boy's face so many times, he knew it by memory. They held hands when they were chased down the streets, laughing and sprinting as their spoils stayed securely in their pockets. But Isaiah was older than him. Soon after adolescence hit the Jesus boy and Peaky Blinders offered him a role, without the constant of Church, the two greatest of friends became almost strangers to one another. But Finn still loved him. He never told anyone, of course. He knew he wasn't a real homosexual, because he most certainly did enjoy holding hands and kissing the cheeks of girls his age (poor boy was flustered to ever do more!) but his heart still belonged to the preacher's boy. With more faithful women in the family than ever before, Finn knew he would be crucified if he ever told anyone. John was the only one who knew, and that was based on the fact he paid more attention to his brother than anyone else combined. He said he should just go for it, but Finn knew Isaiah couldn't be like him. And even if Jeremiah was always the kindest man that Finn ever met, he still didn't trust that the cross on his neck wouldn't shame him or laugh at him for the fact he was completely enamoured with his son. Then Finn got drunk, and when he woke up, his entire family knew exactly how he felt and Isaiah wouldn't look at him in the eye. He ran away to the stables, crying on Uncle Charlie's shoulder who told it would be alright. He made sure to keep an eye on Finn ever since, keeping an eye on his wrists and fists. The incident was soon forgot by everyone but him. Finn couldn't find it in him to hate Isaiah, but he knew he didn't love him any more. Finn has never loved Michael. He thought he could, at first, when he saw the tweed suit and a face more innocent than his. But then Tommy promoted him almost on the spot, and Finn had never at once felt so much rage bubble inside him. Everything he has done for his brothers, every passion he sacrificed, every humiliation he shouldered, just so they could see him as an equal. But no, there are only three Shelby brothers as far as anyone else is concerned, and Finn carries on as errand boy. He ignores all Ada's good advice, and swear that he will make his brothers proud of him one day. So, he puts on the thorn crown of a Peaky cap and wears the waistcoat and wool coat of his brother's likeness, and parades about Small Heath like he actually was apart of the makeshift royal family. Then Finn found Michael and Isaiah kissing in the alleyway. Even though Finn had made a point to announce that his brothers had started giving him more work, Isaiah still fucked off to the pub with Michael every night, devoting his time and attention to only him, and Finn couldn't understand why. Now he did. If Finn had been violent like Arthur, he certainly wouldn't have thought twice about taking the cup on his curls and cutting the smirk off of his cousin. He had stolen his brothers' respect, his surrogate mother's attention, his place in the business, the affections of the one boy Finn had ever loved. He had stolen Finn's everything, and Finn hated him. They both froze and stuttered. Excuses about just being friends, just experimenting, but he saw the way they held each others shaking hands just as he and Isaiah used to hold onto each other as they raced through the streets. "I'm glad you're together." He shocked them both with a forced smile. "You both deserve to be happy." The two were kinder to him after that, almost back to the old friendship he had missed, and Finn knew he didn't hate Michael. Or Isaiah. Or any of his family, really. No, Finn hated himself.

[theculturedmarxist]

     By    Bill Van Auken    

       5 December 2018  

As George W. Bush delivers his eulogy today at the official “national day of mourning” ceremony in Washington for his father, George H. W. Bush—the culmination of five days of non-stop panegyrics and lies about the deceased war criminal and anti-working class reactionary—it is fitting that we repost a commentary published in 2003 dealing with one critical aspect of the actual record of the Bush family.

This article exposes the fact—well known to the corporate media and the politicians of both parties—that a substantial portion of the Bush family fortune was derived from the extensive business relations over many years between the Nazis and the family patriarch, Prescott Bush, George Bush Senior’s father and “Junior’s” grandfather. The lucrative financial dealings of the banker-turned US senator with Hitler’s fascist party and its corporate sponsors in Germany continued into the war years. Thus, the family millions that gave George H. W. Bush and his children a life of privilege and boosted their political careers are bound up with the mass murder and torture of the millions of victims of the Holocaust and the German imperialist rape of Europe.

**

A presidential visit to Auschwitz

The Holocaust and the Bush family fortune

By Bill Van Auken

5 June 2003

“History is a reminder of what’s possible.” These were the words spoken by President George W. Bush as he emerged from a guided tour of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The former Nazi death camp in Poland was one of the first stops on his seven-day tour of Europe and the Middle East.

What precisely the US president meant by this banal comment is not clear. However, given Bush’s political record—assembly-line executions in Texas, Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray, the indefinite imprisonment of US citizens without charges, two preemptive wars—it could be open to the most sinister of interpretations.

There is no doubt that the visit to Auschwitz was choreographed to serve immediate policy objectives: invoking the horrors of Hitler’s concentration camps to further an agenda of militarism and domestic repression. Perhaps no greater disservice could be done to the memory of the six million Jews and the millions of others who were murdered by the Nazis.

In a speech delivered in Krakow that same day, Bush declared that the concentration camps “remind us that evil is real and must be called by name and must be opposed.” He continued: “Having seen the works of evil firsthand on this continent, we must never lose the courage to oppose it everywhere.”

The cause of the Holocaust, Bush suggested, was “evil.” For the US president, the word “evil” serves to cover up a multitude of sins. He has used it repeatedly to describe the Islamic fundamentalist group that carried out the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. On numerous occasions he has referred to the leader of Al Qaeda as “the evil one.” This particular expression serves a very immediate political purpose, since it avoids naming Osama bin Laden and thereby calling to mind the longstanding business association between the Bushes and the wealthy bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia.

The existence of “evil” constitutes the only explanation given by the Bush administration for the emergence of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Such a semi-mystical and religious presentation (which, of course, assumes that the United States government embodies “good”) has the advantage of precluding any consideration of politics or history. In particular, it obscures the role played by US foreign policy—Washington’s alliance with despotic oil-rich regimes such as the one in Saudi Arabia, US sponsorship of the Afghan Mujahadeen, the CIA’s covert war against secular nationalist and socialist groups in the Middle East, the unconditional support for Israel against the Palestinians—in creating the social and political conditions in which retrograde tendencies like Al Qaeda could grow.

The use of the word “evil” serves a similar function in the case of the Holocaust. This attempt to obscure the social, political and economic roots of the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and the horrific crimes that followed is not unique to Bush. The adoption of anti-communism as the core of the post-World War II US ideology made any analysis of the anti-socialist roots of fascism inconvenient. Rather, communism and fascism were equated as “totalitarian” and “evil.”

“Fascism is the continuation of capitalism, an attempt to perpetuate its existence by the most bestial and monstrous measures,” wrote Leon Trotsky on the eve of his assassination in 1940. “Capitalism obtained an opportunity to resort to fascism only because the proletariat did not accomplish the socialist revolution in time.”

This was not just the opinion of Trotsky. It was widely understood that the Nazis, like Mussolini’s fascist party, had been elevated to power with the backing of big business for the purpose of smashing the socialist workers’ movement and eradicating the threat of revolution. The “final solution” that Hitler’s regime developed against the Jews was bound up with this essential mission.

In his authoritative biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw, describing the path taken by the Third Reich to the “final solution,” noted that the war in the East—and ultimately the Holocaust itself—was portrayed in Nazi propaganda as a “crusade against Bolshevism.” Kershaw wrote:

“The more ideologically committed pro-Nazis would entirely swallow the interpretation of the war as a preventive one to avoid the destruction of western culture by the Bolshevik hordes. They fervently believed that Europe would never be liberated before ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was utterly and completely rooted out. The path to the Holocaust, intertwined with the showdown with Bolshevism, was prefigured in such notions. The legacy of hatred towards Bolshevism, fully interlaced with anti-Semitism, was about to be revealed in its full ferocity.” (Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, New York and London, 2001, p. 389).

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the US occupation authorities found themselves obliged to recognize the culpability of German big business in the crimes carried out by the Nazi regime. Gen. Telford Taylor, one of the principal prosecutors in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, pressed for the conviction of some of the top German industrialists. One of these was Friedrich Flick, the co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz Thyssen. From 1932 on, he was one of the main financial contributors to the Nazis and the SS.

Taylor declared in his summation to the court: “We are dealing with men so bent on the attainment of power and wealth that all else took second place. I do not know whether or not Flick and his associates hated the Jews; it is quite possible that he never gave the matter much thought until it became a question of practical importance, and not their inner feelings and sentiments.”

He continued: “The defendants were men of wealth; many mines and factories were their private property. They will certainly tell you that they believed in the sanctity of private property, and perhaps they will say that they supported Hitler because German communism threatened that concept. But the factories of Rombach and Riga belonged to someone else.”

So, one might well add, did the oil wells of Iraq.

The description given by General Taylor of the German ruling elite could, with little alteration, be applied to the predatory layer of multi-millionaires that constitutes the principal base of the Bush administration.

General Taylor, it should be noted, found himself out of step with the subsequent anti-communist historical revisionism until his death in 1998. He was among the earliest figures to publicly confront Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt. And he was a prominent opponent of the US war in Vietnam, arguing that the trial of Lt. William Calley for the massacre of some 500 women and children at My Lai should have been extended right up the US military chain of command.

Prescott Bush and the Nazis

In Bush’s case, covering up the historical origins of fascism in Germany serves a particular, indeed personal, function. While the president’s father had dealings with the bin Ladens, his grandfather made a considerable share of the family fortune through his dealings with Nazi Germany. Some have suggested that the Bushes’ assets have their ultimate source, in part, in the exploitation of slave labor at Auschwitz itself.

From the 1920s into the 1940s—after the Second World War had begun—Prescott Bush was a partner and executive in the Brown Brothers Harriman holding company on Wall Street and a director of one of its key financial components, the Union Banking Corporation (UBC).

Together with his father-in-law George Herbert Walker—the current president’s great grandfather—Prescott Bush controlled another asset of the holding company, the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, which was utilized by the Nazi regime to transport its agents in and out of North America.

Another subsidiary of the Harriman group, Harriman International Co., struck a deal with Hitler’s regime in 1933 to coordinate German exports to the US market.

UBC, meanwhile, managed all of the banking operations outside of Germany for Fritz Thyssen, the German industrial magnate and author of the book I Paid Hitler, in which he acknowledged having financed the Nazi movement from 1923 until its rise to power.

In October 1942, 10 months after it had entered the Second World War, the US government seized UBC and several other companies in which the Harrimans and Prescott Bush had interests. In addition to Bush and Roland Harriman, three Nazi executives were named in the order issued by Washington to take over the bank.

An investigation carried out in 1945 revealed that the bank run by Prescott Bush was linked to the German Steel Trust run by Thyssen and Flick, one of the defendants at Nuremberg. This gigantic industrial firm produced fully half the steel and more than a third of the explosives, not to mention other strategic materials, used by the German military machine during the war years.

On October 28, 1942, the US government confiscated the assets of two firms that served as fronts for the Nazi regime—the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, both controlled by UBC. A month later, it seized Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation (SAC), directed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law, George Walker.

The seizure order, issued under the Trading with the Enemy Act, described Silesian-American as a “US holding company with German and Polish subsidiaries” that controlled large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. It added that, since September 1939 (when Hitler unleashed the Second World War) these properties had been under the control of the Nazi regime, which had utilized them to further its war effort.

Among SAC’s assets was a steel plant in Poland in the same district as Auschwitz. The plant reportedly used the concentration camp’s inmates as slave labor.

Among those who have investigated the links between the Bushes and the Nazis is John Loftus, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s War Crimes Unit, who now heads the Florida Holocaust Museum in Saint Petersburg. Loftus has charged that the Bush family received $1.5 million from its interest in UBC, when the bank was finally liquidated in 1951. “That’s where the Bush family fortune came from: It came from the Third Reich,” Loftus said in a recent speech.

Loftus argues that this money—a substantial sum at that time—included direct profit from the slave labor of those who died at Auschwitz. In an interview with journalist Toby Rogers, the former prosecutor said: “It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920s, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason. The Bush bank helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed Allied soldiers. As bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the Holocaust was worse. Thyssen’s coal mines used Jewish slaves as if they were disposable chemicals. There are six million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions to be answered about the Bush family’s complicity.”

Prescott Bush was by no means unique, though his financial connections with the Third Reich were perhaps more intimate than most. Henry Ford was an avowed admirer of Hitler, and together GM and Ford played the predominant role in producing the military trucks that carried German troops across Europe. After the war, both auto companies demanded and received reparations for damage to their German plants caused by allied bombing.

Standard Oil and Chase Bank, both controlled by the Rockefellers, invested heavily in Nazi Germany, as did many of Wall Street’s leading brokerage houses. These business dealings continued after the war had begun, with Standard Oil shipping fuel to the Nazis through Switzerland as late as 1942 and collaborating with I.G. Farben, the firm that manufactured Zyklon B gas for the Nazi death chambers and operated a synthetic rubber plant using slave labor from Auschwitz.

In his book Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi American Money Plot, former New York Times reporter Charles Higham noted that the US government sought to cover up the role played by Prescott Bush and many other leading US financiers and industrialists in supporting Hitler.

He wrote that the government feared that any attempt to prosecute these figures would only provoke a “public scandal” and “would have drastically affected public morale, caused widespread strikes and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services.” Moreover, Higham wrote, the government believed “their trial and imprisonment would have made it impossible for the corporate boards to help the American war effort.” (Trading with the Enemy—The Nazi American Money Plot 1933-1949, New York, 1983, p. xvii).

The Roosevelt administration and powerful political figures in both parties did their best to smooth over Prescott Bush’s problems arising from his business dealings with the Nazis. He was installed as chairman of the National War Board, helping raise private funds for war-related charities. Shortly after receiving his $1.5 million payout from UBC, he ran successfully for the US Senate from Connecticut, a position he held until 1963.

A considerable section of the leading American capitalists sympathized with Nazism and shared its anti-Semitic outlook, even if not as vocally as Henry Ford. These sentiments continued to inform US policy after the war had begun, with the Roosevelt administration refusing to alter its immigration policies in the slightest to admit Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, and the military rejecting requests that the rail lines to Auschwitz be bombed, on the grounds that they constituted a “non-military target.”

While Bush’s speech writers like to portray US policy in terms of moral absolutes—the struggle of good against evil—the record of complicity of the American ruling class, and the Bush family in particular, with Nazi Germany demonstrates that the only constant is the defense of the power and privilege of the ruling oligarchy by whatever means are required.

In the 1930s and 1940s this overriding consideration led George W. Bush’s grandfather to establish a profitable commercial relationship with the Nazis. In the 1980s, it underlay the alliance forged—in no small part by George W. Bush’s father, the senior President Bush—with the Islamic fundamentalists in the war against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. Today it is at the heart the younger Bush’s policies of militarism and colonialism abroad and repression and social attacks at home.

[communist-automaton]

170 Years of Class Struggle

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto, a critique of Bourgeois (Capitalist) economics and a declaration of intent to dismantle through various revolutionary means that system and institute a new system where human civilization is no longer defined by the struggle between classes.

When that document was written, both Capitalism and Marx himself were at the beginning of their journeys. Marx's views evolved and deepened over time, though he never abandoned his prediction of an inevitable end to Capitalism through revolution. Meanwhile, over the past 170, Capitalism has evolved from being a primarily manufacture-based means of commodity production and distribution to an all-encompassing social paradigm where absolutely everything -- whether tangible or intangible, valuable or invaluable or not valuable at all -- is for sale.

At first glance, it would seem Marx got things all wrong. After all, there have been no Proletarian revolutions in the Capitalist world. Every Capitalist country has in fact continued to develop, and the median standard of living for citizens of those countries has continued to rise. The few Communist revolutions that have occurred, specifically in Russia, China, Korea, Cuba, and Viet Nam, have invariably either collapsed and been replaced with Capitalist governments, or have over a period of time slowly opened their markets to Capitalist investment and intervention. This indeed is the general consensus among most global economists. The question of whether Capitalism can be sustained indefinitely has been answered, unequivocally, in the affirmative.

But it would be a mistake to pat ourselves on the back without taking an honest look at why Capitalism seems to have defeated Communism so soundly. In fact, looking at the details of the world's strongest Capitalist economies should give the objective observer some reason to suspect that the math is not quite as cut and dry as we are led to believe.

What Marx got right

First of all, Marx got many things right. That isn't even a controversial statement if you talk to most economists. Das Kapital is still most-cited economic textbook published before 1950, and his theories were not, even according to the economic authorities in Capitalist countries, simply "wrong". Marx described a number of market forces that are still being harnessed by Capitalist nations to their own ends. He also proposed a number of solutions to the problem of wage-laborer exploitation that have been co-opted almost universally by modern Capitalist nations in order to sustain the labor-exploitation system.

Capitalism, gone unchecked, exploits workers, and the overriding class pressure on individuals is downward. This is a truism today. It is why developed nations have social safety nets like food stamps and socialized medical care. Even the most backward nations, like the United States, have some skeletal semblance of such systems simply to keep the working class from falling entirely into the ranks of the homeless unemployed and robbing the system of all access to exploitable labor.

Universal public education for all children, a specific demand in the Communist Manifesto, has been implemented universally in the developed world. Granted, these systems arose not because of some kindhearted desire to raise living standards, but because it was necessary to prepare children for their lives as daily wage-laborers. But the result was as close to perfect literacy rates in the developed world as has ever been achieved.

Capitalist societies furnish the exploited working class with the means necessary to organize a resistance to their own exploitation. Communications and transportation technologies, necessary to any such organization, are ubiquitous in developed nations. And not only are they everywhere and accessible by nearly everyone, they are in fact actually being used for the purpose of resisting exploitation. Video and audio recordings are used to publicize condemn summary executions by police; on-demand communication platforms are used to document protests, demonstrations, and riots; blogs and video channels are always contributing new ideas, suggestions, and instructions to the public domain; self-published books are recording history and encouraging action. And those are just tools of information warfare. More kinetic sorts of tools are also available, from firearms to improvised explosive devices, thanks to the cheap manufacturing made possible by the Capitalist system.

What Marx got wrong

But, of course, Marx wasn't a prophet. He was young when he wrote the Communist Manifesto, and that shows in the document's naivety and simplicity. Mostly, the shortcomings are in Marx's failure to appreciate the flexibility of the Capitalist system and its ability to adopt and monetize everything, including the social and economic forces that he expected to lead to Communist revolution.

Also, the same tools furnished to the working class that might enable and inspire their struggle against the Capitalist ruling class can just as easily be used by that ruling class against the working people. Communications technology is used routinely and universally by Capitalist regimes in an unending barrage of propaganda and distorted news that diverts attention from exploitation and refocuses the rage of the working class onto itself rather than its ruling class masters.

Marx assumed that the natural -- even inevitable -- result of Capitalist development was an eventual proletarian revolution. Exploited people would get so tired of being exploited that they would rise up and cast off the chains put on them by the Bourgeoisie. In this, Marx failed to anticipate the range of compromises and counteractive measures that would be taken by Capitalist nations to delay, defuse, and ultimately prevent such uprisings. While there were limited demonstrations and even riots in response to specific cases of exploitation that resulted in labor laws and unions, there were no full-scale revolutions except in still-developing countries where Capitalism had not yet developed into a complete economic-political paradigm. And, where labor unions did take hold, their leaders were quickly brought into the Bourgeois camp and corrupted with money and influence.

And Marx did not have the benefit of modern science showing that human development does not happen in an ecological vacuum. Environmental concerns were mostly sentimental ones in the middle 19th century -- there was not yet a known risk to the ecosystem of the entire planet which would arise from Capitalist manufacturing and consumption.

Where We Stand Now

In the early 21st century we are no longer dealing with a Bourgeois society having just arisen from the wreckage of a Feudalist one, but a mature, in many ways doddering and incompetent, but nevertheless effectively omnipresent Capitalist society that has assumed control not only of manufacturing and agriculture, but every facet of human life in all realms, in all places, and at all times. It is a persistent, all-encompassing, omnipresent reality, not merely an economic phenomenon.

The people of today's world are born into a system where nearly every interaction is transactional, if not expressly monetary. We express almost every idea in terms of what is invested versus what is earned back. Society is consumed by the notion that a person's social value is equivalent to their financial net worth. We assume that nothing exists that cannot be expressed by an economic equation of some sort. Our governments are not only beholden to but for the most part consist of crony Capitalists whose only interest in the welfare of the people is their value as a repository of exploitable labor.

Worse, we have lost almost all concept of the proletariat or "working class" except as a badge of some kind of perverted pride in "hard work". People in general who are exploited by wage labor or otherwise beholden to employers for the bare necessities of life tend not to think of themselves as such. We count ourselves lucky if we manage to find enough work to be able to feed ourselves and our families. We take it for granted that we will continue working until we die; that it is our lot in life to be exploited for the whole of our existence, even if we refuse to admit to ourselves that it is exploitation we are talking about. Ideas like "revolution" never even enter the minds of most people. Revolution would threaten what little security they have, no matter how fleeting or illusory that security is.

Ultimately, we cannot depend upon working class to save itself from this system. It is too deeply conditioned against its own self-interest to even consider such a "radical" course of action. People are indoctrinated from an early age to take some "rights" for granted that really make no sense if we think about them, and they have been conditioned to automatically reject anything with the word "Communism" attached to it. And that isn't surprising. A society ruled by the Bourgeoisie must institutionalize hatred for the Proletariat for its own survival.

What that means is that there will never be a critical mass of support for an outright Communist agenda in the West, and especially not in America, until the failures of Capitalism are so obvious and so severe that no one can deny it any more. Unfortunately, by that time, we will be out of time ecologically and Fascism will have completely enclosed Western civilization in its iron grasp anyway. Millions of homeless will have been eliminated (one way or another), and whole people will have been relegated to a permanent second- or third-class status based on their racial or sexual identities.

So now we face the urgent question of what to do about this. If we refuse to give up the dream of equality for all people across all the imaginary boundaries between us, then we must act. And if the people will not unite and act with us, then we must act on their behalf.