Six on Karl Marx: Marx at 200: Just Getting Started; Tearing Away the Veils: The Communist Manifesto; Marxism's Fatal Flaw; W
philip panaritis
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"As many have argued, the Democrats have been demonizing the white working class as irredeemable racists, and ignoring that what might look like race-driven actions are not so tidily separated from “competition from lower-wage workers who in my line of work are significantly from a specific ethnic group.” Urie stresses that capitalism has regularly created that very sort of competition.
This pattern has occurred often in American history. Waves of new immigrant groups, when they came and stayed in cities, as opposed to using ports of entry as stopping points to taking up offers of free/cheap land in the boonies, were correctly seen as economic competitors to lower-class “natives” even if those “natives” were themselves American-born children of immigrant parents. It isn’t that long ago in historical terms that Irish and Jews were both seen as non-white in America.
As we have also written, there was an outbreak of anti-immigrant sentiment in America at the beginning of the 20th Century, both from the labor movement, which was beginning to achieve some success, and even from the bourgeoisie, where the concern was loss of American culture and values (with the immediate symptom too many ‘furriners who didn’t speak English well). The National Association of Manufacturers, whose members wanted unimpeded access to cheap workers, launched a very successful Americanization program, supposedly to help new arrivals learn English and become citizens. The intent was to drive a wedge between the working class, who saw immigrants as an economic threat, and the better off, who saw them as a “way of life” threat. That led to the creation of an astroturf group, the North American Civic League for Immigrants, in 1907."
"It is hard for many victims of the communist system to accept that a west German city is putting up a monument like this," he said.
Still, a recent poll by Ipsos in 28 countries found that Germans, whose nation is now the economic powerhouse of Europe, were far more skeptical about capitalism and free markets than people in other countries. The online survey of 20,793 adults around the world last month found that only 49% of German respondents agreed that free market competition brings out the best in people, compared with clear majorities of 70% and higher in a host of other countries — including not only the United States, but also China. Only in France were people more doubtful about free markets bringing out the best in people.
"There's a lot of criticism about the excesses of the free market economy in Germany," said Robert Grimm, 43, director of political research at Ipsos in Germany and an East German by birth.
"Social inequality and poverty is the biggest worry," he added. "People have lost faith in capitalism. It's created an economic environment that's not as transparent as it was and a dynamic where many people feel threatened."
In any event, Trier, a city of 115,000 in the Moselle River wine region whose politics have long been dominated by Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, is banking on capitalism fueled by Marx. Vendors are busy selling everything from zero-euro notes with Marx's hirsute face on them (for nearly $4) to rubber ducks wearing Marx-style beards. It has installed Marx-like green and red figures on traffic lights for pedestrian crossings and a local jeweler is selling silver Karl Marx rings bearing his visage.
Over in the eastern city of Chemnitz, the nostalgia for Marx in the place that long bore his name led one savings bank to issue credit cards with a picture of the 23-foot-high Marx bust that still stands in the city. A local brewery created a "Marx Staedter" (Marx city dweller) brew in March."
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