Red State: Class Warfare: American Communists of 1928 Compared to Barack Obama

[Patricia M. McBride]

When you read this, please remember Obama trying to blame cell phones and other innovations for unemployment.  The man must have eaten, slept and drank communist propaganda his whole life.  It is a philosophy which is totally ingrained in him.  I thought today, in 3 short years, this man has taken away almost every freedom we had and invaded every single thing in our lives (we no longer have privacy of anything....he has our financial records, our medical records, can alter what we say or get rid of it on the internet and is brain washing the children of this country into amoral beliefs and falsehoods about their own country and its system of government etc) and he and his charming communist partner are even bold enough to try to tell people how to raise their children and what everyone should eat and are taking "bad" things either off the market or forcing the suppliers to change them to the point they won't be the same any longer.  He has ruined our economy and bankrupted us...............in 3 short years................... and he has the audacity to think we will re-elect him, so he can complete the distruction of our country and our lives.

 

Posted by Erick Erickson

Wednesday, September 21st

The other day I linked to a rather silly post at Think Progress by Matthew Yglesias. His point was that Obama is not engaging in class warfare because if you want real class warfare look at the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. That was real class warfare. Never mind how similar some of what the CPGB wanted in 1928 is what Obama is calling for now.

But we don’t have to look to the CPGB. We can look to the Communist Party of America 1928. Consider this, for example:

A capitalist writer characterizes the present unemployment as a ‘technological unemployment, not cyclical — an unemployment developing gradually, almost unawares, like creeping paralysis, in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, the byproduct of improved technological efficiency.”

Unemployment is indeed the ‘creeping paralysis’ of capitalist society. It represents the most vicious contradiction of the present economic order. The more machinery, the higher the productivity of labor, the more unemployed. . . .

The present depression is not an ‘accident.’ It has been brought about by prosperity itself. Disproportion between production and consumption, which is a part of the general anarchy of capitalist production, is responsible for cyclical crises. Saturation of the automobile and building construction markets, over-production of oil, the world coal crisis, the migration of the textile industry to the South, the limits of installment buying, the restriction of the farmers’ market, the effects of American export of capital and of the stabilization of Europe, the increased competition with Europe — these are the basic features of the present economic depression. Neither the existence of huge monopolies and trusts nor the “interventions” of the Federal Reserve Bank are able to prevent the occurrence of economic crisis.

[Emphasis in original]

Compare that to this from Ron Suskind’s new book Confidence Men:

“Both [Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers and chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer] were, in fact, were concerned by something the president had said in a morning briefing: that he thought the high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy. Summers and Romer were startled. “What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,” Romer said, “We wondered where this could have been coming from. We both tried to convince him otherwise. He wouldn’t budge.”

The excerpt is here and found by Ben Domenech in his most excellent Transom.

But, and back to the original point, what about the class warfare? No one does class warfare better than the communists. So consider the American communists’ platform in 1928 instead of the British communists. 

What did they want?

• Unemployment Insurance
• Immediate emergency help for all workers who have been unemployed two months or more, consisting of eight weeks wages for each worker.
• Public works. The federal, state, and city governments should devise schemes for improving the roads and bridges of the country, improving the rivers, canals, docks, and harbors, setting up electric power stations, reforestation, land drainage and land reclamation, extension and electrification of railways. On all public works trade union wages and conditions must be guaranteed by law.
• Immediate abolition of vagrancy laws. Protection of employed workers from arrest on charges of vagrancy.

Oh, but wait, there’s more.

Here’s some more from their platform.

The working class of this country is facing a great crisis. A general offensive of the bosses is being conducted against the workers, an offensive to smash the whole trade-union movement, to lower the standard of living of all workers.

Among other things, the communists called for a “fight for high wages. Strike against wage cuts” and “trade-union methods alone cannot wage a successful fight. Trade-union struggle must be supplemented by political struggle.”

But wait, some lefties will say. The Communist Party also wanted to “destroy company unions.” That’s true. But why? It was not to end unionization, but rather to supplant unionism into the political culture and leadership, something the communists believed would not be possible with corporate unions pre-existing the struggle.

The communist party went on, in 1928, to demand “free medical treatment, medicine, and hospital care for all wage-earners” and “tax-exemption[s] for all working and exploited farmers: as well as a “graduated income tax” that, like the British communists, would seize all income above $25,000 per year in 1928. They also favored a “graduated inheritance and gift taxes on great fortunes.”

 

read more here:  http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/09/21/class-warfare-american-com...