And he’s gone Full Metal Blunt on this one; not that I mind.
In fact, if you look at a Marxist Utopia — say, Cuba — what you’ll see is basically a plantation. At the top, you’ve got the Massa and his family — Fidel, Raul, et al. — followed by various layers of overseers — the Communist Party apparat, the secret police — and House Negroes — e.g., the state-controlled media — all living off the surplus labor of the Field Negroes, whose produce is disposed of not according to their own desires (that would be capitalism!) but according to their betters’. This, we’re told, is for the best, since they aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions anyway, and the Massa looks after them with food, housing, and health care. Slaveholders even defended their system as more humane and less exploitative than atomistic capitalism, conveniently ignoring the role of the lash, just as apologists for Marxism conveniently ignore the role of the gulag.
Because he’s talking about Commies, after all: and Commies Aren’t Cool.
Yeah, Glenn Reynolds has been making much more pointed comments over the last year or two. I like it.
I followed the link he has on “exploitative”, and it’s a doozy — the Wikipedia article on a guy who argued FOR slavery before the Civil War. The guy believed that free markets are more exploitative than slavery and that slavery was the most developed form of socialism. Said that nineteen of twenty people “have the right to be enslaved” (whatever that means).
Oh, and he’s considered a champion of women’s rights. Which is odd, because he also argued that 95% of them should be slaves. But I’m guessing whoever wrote that has a limited sense of “rights”.
(The guy’s long-dead, so that’s why he’s not in Obama’s cabinet.)
Yeah, George Fitzhugh was a really nasty piece of work.
Oh yeah, it’s the last line of Animal Farm in all it’s explicit, gory detail, isn’t it?
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
“Yeah, George Fitzhugh was a really nasty piece of work.”
And, shockingly, his philosophy still echoes today. How often had you heard a lefty make snide remarks about “wage slaves”?