Hi Foxy,

Yes, either Marx wrote once to Engels, or the other way round (or Engels wrote to someone else later), asking about the nature of the English working class, maybe in about 1880 (or maybe 1890). Whichever one replies, something like,

'Well, England is a strange country: it has not only a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois bourgeoisie, but is well on the way to developing a bourgeois working-class.'

I suspect that Marx lost a lot of his illusions about the success of communist revolutions after the defeat of the Paris Commune in mid-1871. Nearly 150 years ago now. So there's been a lot of water under that bridge since his time.

Of course, although he would never have admitted it, Marx's theories were Utopian, and therefore doomed to disaster from Day One. If not well before.

Joe

Dear Joe,

Many also believe there has been a general tendency
for societies to move from the simple to the complex,
although they don't necessarily equate this evolution
with "progress" toward something better.

Marx, was looking at industrial and agrarian societies dominated by small elites. Abject poverty among the working class and the rural peasants that stretched across Europe from Ireland to Russia was the reality. Marx and Engels may have being idealising a Utopian world of communism, but their communist ideology was in the right place, at the right time.

The Capitalist was forced to acknowledge that to grow his wealth, he had to expand the consumer middle class, and that involved some higher degree of wealth distribution. With that came a growing need for mass education to fuel an even more complex Capitalistic society. Education and increased middle class wealth was a double edged sward for the elite. The growing middle class started to demand citizen rights, such as a political say through limited democracy. The middle class was organising the working class through labour organisations, not only to benefit themselves but to benefit all in society, the dawn of the altruistic social conscience. Czarist Russia was a state where the elite was unwilling to make the necessary changes to accommodate the middle class, the result was the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was not at first clear that the Bolsheviks were going to succeed, but they did through Lenin's superior leadership.

The US election is now only days away. And judging
from news sources the distinct impression is that
no matter who wins, the country is still going to
be divided.

However, as one ex-pat living in Sydney stated:

"How any sane, rational person looking around what's
been happening in the US in the past 4 years would think -
' I want another 4 years of this. I don't understand".

Hi Foxy,

But I suspect that we will be looking into the soul of America, or at least those of very many Americans, in this election. I suspect that a lot of implicit, taken-for-granted, smugly-assumed white hegemony, monopoly, supremacy, whatever you want to call it, will crop out of much of the explanations about why people vote for Trumpf.

Of course, there a touch of this, at least, here in Australia - the unspoken assumption that whites, Anglos, alone will rule forever Australia and that anybody from any other group, or 'tainted' through birth or marriage with some other group, is forever going to have just slightly fewer rights. And, of course, especially if they are female :)

In other words, while the 'left' may have its totem-pole of which groups have more rights to attention than others, i.e. which groups have suffered more than others, the right also has always had its totem-pole, geared much more to the status quo and long-term power-structure.

Just saying :)

Joe

Dear Joe,

Thanks you for your perceptive comments.
Food for thought.