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Where is the party of opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? They're yelling about us so I guess that makes us something! Like a turd on the dinner table, they can't ignore us.
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all Europoean powers to be itself an annoyance.
2. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views that they can't offer any more answers than anybody else. We're just as corrupt as the next guy- you might as well go back to having a king. So they publish their views, their aims, their tendencies which aren't any freakin' different than any other dissident group in history.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled
in London, and after several rounds of British Stout, have sketched
the following manifesto to be published in the English, French, German,
Italian, Flemish, and Danish languages.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. You have to realize, that it takes a raving fanatic to fit all that into one sentance... Shit, I didn't even breathe!
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. Like when Mom would let Sis go out to the store alone but no, not me because I wasn't old enough. And how come Dad always got to stay up late? It's not fair! It's too complicated. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guildmasters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. Like my boss, he walks around all day with his hands in his pockets. I can do that, how come he gets a fat paycheck and I don't? That poophead doesn't know what he's doing; I could do it better- I know, cause I said so. I don't like subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. We'll just ignore that the bourgeois didn't invent class stratification. Never mind that, under Plato, classes were distinctly defined because of academic socio-babble. We'll remember that the Greeks gave us democracy, not that they said it couldn't work; only the aristocracy should rule. We'll even forget that they had rampant slavery. No, we need a good scapegoat and so, we'll pick on the bourgeois instead of social morality.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: It has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other- bourgeoisie and proletariat. I'll not mention that this also existed more than two thousand years ago under Aristotle, who said, "For the common people quarrel about the inequality of property, the higher class about the equality of honor;" I'll ignore that because, right now there's a labor movement going on and I wanna get on the band-wagon!
( More diligent translations to follow )
© 1997
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