June 16, 2002
Sometimes somebody else puts it so crisply that it’s impossible to improve on it. Writes Nick: “There’s something wrong when it’s easier to crash a plane into New York than ship rice to the US.” [10:17 AM]
I just do not understand it. You have political democracy--you have the allegiance of the army to the constitutional democratic order--why do you let the plutocrats boss you around? Even your own bourgois economists tell you that the artificial creation of monopolies through trade restrictions is destructive!
Yours in struggle,
Karl Marx
And moreover, the ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity! I say, pull down!
Is this the room for the meeting of weird old guys with beards?
It is, but we don't need your kind in here, if you get my drift and I think you do.
Right, Karl ol' buddy?
When you have rice, I'll give it to you.
When you have no rice, I'll take it from you.
Basho: I knew you'd say that. After all, rice is the Staff of Life in Asia...
There is no rice, and also no lack of it. There is no repletion, no starvation, and also no absense of them; free trade is tariff and tariff, trade; exploitation is foreign aid and foreign aid, exploitation.
Shipped, shipped, shipped beyond, shipped altogether beyond!
In answer to your original question, Karl, let me refer you to your own Revolution and Counter-Revolution -- in particular, Chapter IX, on Panslavism and the Schleswig-Holstein war.
"They had everywhere revived the old national animosities, which heretofore had prevented any common understanding and action... They had accustomed the people to scenes of civil war and repression by the military."
(Need I bring up Deputy Solicitor General Clement's argument yesterday in the Hamdi case?)
"[T]he regular army... was placed in a position to regain public favor by victories over the foreigner. But we repeat: these armies, strengthened by the Liberals ... no sooner had recovered their self-confidence and their discipline in some degree, than they turned themselves against the Liberals, and restored to power men of the old system."
Mikhail
"The best defense is a good offense, you know who said that? Mel, the cook on 'Alice'."
ED GRUBERMAN, THIS IS THE ANGEL OF ATTRIBUTION. YOU MUST STOP GETTING YOUR CITATIONS FROM OLD COMEDY NUMBERS.
HISTORY MAY NOW RECOMMENCE.
First, I would like to say to Ineffable and Unpronounceable: "Begone! This is the adulthood of humanity! We no longer need the opium dreams that have created you and your kind!
"We now make our own history! And soon we will make it under circumstances of our own choosing!"
Next, I would like to reply to Mikhail Bakunin, who as usual--the idiot! the objective tool of reactionary scum! the purveyor of anarchist fantasies that distract the people from the project of realizing socialism in a really existing manner!--misses the point completely.
The agricultural tariffs and subsidies are not part of the struggle between capitalism and socialism. They are part of the struggle between large-scale agrarian capital on the one hand and industrial and post-industrial capital, and the petit bourgeoisie on the other. And in this the ideologists of the bourgeoisie are all assembled against the agrarians. They have no arguments on their side, they can only paint a romanticized picture of the idiocy of rural life. Indeed, do you think those who will profit from the farm bill have ever picked a strawberry in the California sun, or harvested sugar cane in Florida, or even driven a plow in South Dakota?
Words fail me. If the bourgeoisie cannot even maintain its own rights against agrarian monopolists, it must be a feeble and sickly class indeed. Why, then, is there no socialism in the United States?
WELL, *OF COURSE*!
(PULLS UP LAWN CHAIR, POPS A COLD BEER, SITS BACK TO WATCH)
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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