Real Meaning of Marxism: Disintegration of the Family

Phil Gramm: “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.”
Progressive: “No, you don’t.”
Phil Gramm: “Okay: What are their names?”

Given that Marxism has little real dialogue with anything outside of a plan to have government-owned everything, it makes one wonder what "dialect" means for dialectical materialism.  It surely doesn't mean that Marxism merely revises itself in response to objective inquiry.  Nothing objective will avail itself against the axiom of 'class struggle' in terms of which all must be interpreted.  All facts serve the self-evident truth.

If anything, it is a warning about anything that needs to validate itself with the word 'scientific.'  Marx' "dialectic" may have borrowed conceptually from Hegel, but Marx had no truck with Hegel's idealism.  He thought he was turning Hegel's idea on its ear by rooting it in materialism, and to Marx materialism was realism and realism was materialism.

What could be more objective then, than finding the 'meaning' of Marxism in its policies.  Marx himself outlined 10 platform points to convert a society to communism.

It amuses me when folks think that you can put everything in the hands of the People, by taking control away from people and giving it to government, an elite oligarchy of central planners.  When personal property is abolished (the 1st point) who gets to decide what is done with the "public" property?  Some animals are created more equal than others.

Aside from Marx' points to put all capital, credit, production resources, communication, and transportation in the hands of the state (any and all of which to lead toward collectivist totalitarianism, Marx was quite right), there is something else that is important:

Consider #10 (public education) and #3 together (abolition of inheritance):  Instead of allowing children to work, it important that the government instead cultivates them to be workers for the public good, train them to be loyal instruments of public production.

An interesting parallel in America.  Liberals have been arguing that student debt is yet another problem for government to solve.  Young "adults" who are surprised that their Ivy League degree in French literature isn't securing a job lucrative enough to pay off the college debt are eager to believe that their debt is a trick of evil capitalism.  Educators that increasingly are dependent on the public trough teach our kids that socialism is good and right and sound (it's scientifical!) and that capitalism is the enemy.  Government to the rescue!  You have a right to the degree of your choice with no debt incurred to you but to the public (wait, are you part of the public?)

And when the education bubble eventually bursts and cutbacks are necessary, who but the government is going to decide on what you study based on your aptitude (and possibly on the prospects of your loyalty to the State)?

In the mean time, the public debt balloons to pay for ever-increasing benefits for educators who are so mistreated that ever more people are trying to get in on that deal, and all to train kids to love the benefits of statism: The more control the government exercises over national education policy and funding of universities,  instead of school authorities being beholden to the parents that pay those bills, the more school tends toward statism and the teaching of values that are at odds with that of the parents.

Consider the decreasing role of the family:  If I'm not accountable to my family, then maybe I'll opt for Comparative English Lit or Race Consciousness Studies instead of something in Business or Engineering, after all, I don't have to convince them to go into debt for something that's likely to pay off.  Instead, I can have the government put it on the tab for EVERYONE.  After all, educators have long assured me that there are enough rich people around to pay for everything.  No, the government will provide me with my choice and insulate me from the consequences of poor decisions - at cost to everybody.  What an appeal to narcissism.

And now consider again, Abolition of Inheritance.  When an athlete is born with a skill that makes him millions per year, do we demand that the State correct this cosmic injustice by hobbling the athlete?  There is after all nothing fair about his tremendous talent.  Let's say I am born with very few genetic advantages.  Maybe instead, my advantage is this: my parents worked hard, made prudent decisions, and saved so that I would have economic advantages to make up for my lack of other advantages.

Marxism ensures that parents do not have this at their disposal.  In fact, it gives the government more and more control to keep parents from accumulating too much filthy capital. (AT SOME POINT, YOU'VE MADE ENOUGH MONEY.)  It frees your children from worry about being disinherited by making them the heirs and the wards of the STATE ALONE.  Inheritance makes parents powerful competitors with the state; without it, only the opinion of government officials matters.

No, my parents shouldn't be able to plan for my future.  And there's no need.  Papa State looks after me.  Papa State has my best interests at heart.  Papa State loves me. For Papa State so loved the people, that Papa State sent his educators to give them the truth, that whosoever believeth in them shall not struggle, but be provided for forevermore. Amen.

You see, the family is the fundamental natural unit of economy.  In order for humanity to perpetuate, a man and woman would provide not only for themselves, but for their children.  Their children were their career, their health plan, their retirement plan, their life.  Only so much waste can be tolerated because the consequences could be disastrous and would not take long to be felt.  Realism tends to reign over idealism in familial survival.

In the collectivist utopian dream of Marx, the family is in direct competition with government for the allocation of time and capital, control of expenditure and revenue.  That's why in a "workers' government" both parents work (rather than build a home) while the government fills their progeny with the right ideas for cooperating with the central planners.  You see, it's not enough for the government to control all capital, credit, communication, transportation, energy and production.  In a materialist society, people are resources too, and they are state property, as evidenced in China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba.  They must own people.  They must own the mind, so they must own education.  In collectivism, the only way everybody can be free is for everybody to belong to the government.  And the government, as someone said recently, is THE ONLY THING WE ALL BELONG TO.

It makes one wonder, if Hitler was so right-wing, why did he stick so closely to the 10 Points?   Why did his National Socialism borrow so much from Marx' proposed policies for a communist society?   I mean, it's one thing for the Progressives in America to follow them, since they identify Left, but for the German Socialists of the 30s/40s, the worker's party?  Why did the collectivist recipe for totalitarianism outlined in the wake of WWII by George Orwell in his novel 1984 agree so well with both Hitler and Lenin?  It really makes you wonder.

But there is one main thing that Orwell got wrong and the Huxley dystopian novel (Brave New World) got right.  Socialism doesn't have to inhibit sexuality in order to control people.  Far from it. Where Orwell has a young girl protesting the government by secret acts of promiscuity, Hitler alienated teenagers from their parents' morality by offering them free love, to produce offspring for the Homeland. Not to create families for themselves, but to create strong workers for the Fatherland.  Orgiastic indulgence is so much more attractive than traditional mores.  I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Nazi slogan similar to "Question Authority."

When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side.' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already.What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'
~Adolf Hitler, 1933

Sounds a lot like publicly-funded school to me.  Early sexualization.  (Ever earlier.  You have to involve the government because parents can't be relied on.)  Free condoms for kids.  (Ah, they'll do it anyway! *leer*)   Teachers that can drive kids to get an abortion without parental consent or notification.   Professors that can demonstrate orgasms in university classrooms.  College as the place for sexual experimentation and formation of sexual identity away from parental authority with new, cooler educational authorities validating their right to "sexual expression."  Kids, you don't need your parents for anything other than to generate capital/revenue so that Papa State can raise you up in the way you should go. You will be free from your parents' silly superstitions when you are finally the wards of the state.

What undermines the natural formation of man-woman alliances to rear the children they themselves procreate and instill the values they believe necessary for perpetuating, increases the potential for government intervention and intrusion.

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had a private notion of children, your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children.  So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s we start making better investments.”
~ Melissa Harris-Perry*

It doesn't merely take a village. It takes a State.

This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.
~Adolf Hitler, 1937

Education for Death (Disney anti-Nazi cartoon)