Introducing Marxism

Introducing Marxism, I

By John Taylor; 19 December, 2005

I continue going through every volume I can get my hands on of the
illustrated "Introducing..." non-fiction series put out by Icon Books
in England. I enjoy and learn from these because they cover ground
otherwise inaccessible, plus their illustrations offer another path
into and around the text. Encountering both words and drawings
balancing one another makes arcane ideas clear, stable in memory. You
use both sides of the brain, visual and verbal. If one flags the other
can grasp the meaning, which means that when I would otherwise be too
tired or distracted, I can now read with profit. This changes
everything. Ordinary prose now seems like a unicycle, an illustrated
book like riding a bicycle. I wonder how I got along with just that
one wheel.

What is more, and this is indeed strange, I can be wading through an
abstruse discussion (the most difficult of the half dozen or so
Introducing books so far is "Introducing Semiotics") and then my
six-year-old son Tomaso will peek over my shoulder and follow along. I
amuse myself by going over the twenty or thirty pages just read and
retelling the story for him, giving the cartoons an alternate story. I
keep the names the same but give the illustrator's pastiches and
caricatures a funny of plot. The comic book-like format is attractive
to him and I find that the strange and unfamiliar names of
intellectuals, strange and difficult to me even, for Tomaso are not
nearly as demanding as the imaginary names in Japanese comic series,
such as Yugi-oh or Pokeman. Surprisingly often, though, I do not have
to change much. The battles between rival schools of thought are not
all that different from the incessant violence in ordinary comic
books.

I just finished the 2004 volume, "Introducing Marxism," and will look
at that in detail today. Thomas found the antics of Karl Marx and his
sidekick, Fredrick Engels especially intriguing. I asked him
rhetorically: "Why is Marx so famous and Engels so little known?" He
guesses right away. Obviously, because his beard is so huge. That sad,
scraggly little beard that life saddled poor Frederick Engels with
impresses nobody. Of course, as an adult I know the real reason that
Marx's ideas are so powerful today. Because he had that sidekick. Only
in the Twentieth Century did Walt Disney discover the evocative power
of the cute sidekicks on the imagination of young and old. I am not
the first to think of Disney as a Marxist, though.

The caricature of Marx runs through this volume, asking questions
disputing with his critics, turning up at unexpected times. That huge
beard and thick body kicking away at his opponents and then being
kicked back in turn amused me until I woke in the middle of the night
with an off-putting thought. Marx in physical appearance, stocky body,
wide head, very much resembles Baha'u'llah. Or at least the pictures
that I have seen, and they may or may not be authentic. Every
description that I have read of the Manifestation is of a mesomorph
like Marx, thick beard, though not quite as broad; Marx does not wear
a fez, though. Which is why Baha'is had better start making
illustrated books about the Faith avoiding picturing the
non-portrayable before non-believers jump in with their own
caricatures that we would find offensive.

Introducing Marxism begins with a good little synopsis of the
Communist Manifesto (CM), which I include in full below, with comments
after each platform. As you can see, the CM is in its own way a
caricature of the Baha'i principles. Of course, since the Manifesto
came first -- around the time that the Bab declared -- one might say
that the Master's set of principles were consciously drawn up as a
comment, correction or purification of the Communist Manifesto. A
manifesto, by the way, was a document widely posted either to
promulgate a law or by an aggressive power to declare war on another
nation. That is why the CM starts

The Communist Manifesto (summary from pp. 4-5 of "Introducing Marxism")

CM1. "Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of
land to public purposes."

While Baha'is hold to private property, ownership of land is not
regarded as inviolate, much less a Causus Belli. "Land belongs not to
one people, but to all people. This earth is not man's home, but his
tomb." (Abdu'l-Baha, Paris Talks, 28) We envisage a united world
government as having final say over resources, including land. As the
world order is now, the worst thing that can happen to a small nation
is for oil or other discoveries take place on its land. The battle
over who gets the cash tears the nation apart, as demonstrated most
recently in Chad. Bad as over-concentration of land ownership may be,
regarding religion as one's own private domain is much more harmful:

"Those who would have men believe that religion is their own private
property once more bring their efforts to bear against the Sun of
Truth: they resist the Command of God; they invent calumnies, not
having arguments against it, neither proofs. They attack with masked
faces, not daring to come forth into the light of day." (Paris Talks,
103)

This masking and hiding in darkness explains why the Manifesto starts
off so ominously, more like a ghost story than a political
declaration. It says that the "spectre of communism is haunting
Europe..." Communism, it avers, is a Power in itself, and it was
scaring the bejeebers out of politicians everywhere, who were using it
as a "nursery tale" to scare children. Nobody had a clear idea of what
communism means, so the purpose of the CM was to give the floating
phantasm a concrete, understandable form.

CM2. "A heavy progressive or graduated income tax."

Not original to Europe, a graduated income tax was part of its "open
secret" inheritance from Islam. Radical as it seemed, when the CM was
written Islamic nations had had a thousand years experience in such
taxation.

The following forced equalization by a centralized state are too
radical, dangerous and unnecessary.

CM3. "Abolition of all rights of inheritance."

CM4. "Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels."

CM5. "Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of
a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly."

CM6. "Centralization of the means of communication and transport in
the hands of the state."

Is this so radical? The Internet originally was put together by the
military and then according to good capitalist doctrine was handed
over and financed privately. It remains today strictly in corporate
hands, and Bush II raps the fingers of anyone who suggests it be
passed over to public hands. Now we find that whenever a security
expert points out a flaw or vulnerability in the structure of the net,
corporations take the easy way out. They fire the security expert,
suppress the information and save money on repairing the cracks in the
dike. The proto-fascist structure and absolute power of the modern
corporation assure that every day our world is a bit more precarious.

CM7. "Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by
the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the
improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan."

Now of course extensive environmental degradation means that the tough
planning challenge is to resist overdevelopment. As Paul said, "for
meat, destroy not the work of God..." (Rom 14:20) But even today, in
reaction to Communism, any hint of planning is still anathema to
hegemonists, except of course planning that benefits them directly.

CM8. "Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial
armies, especially for agriculture."

The first sentence here became Baha'i law, and it too was first
broached by St. Paul. The second I do not know exactly what Marx and
Engels were talking about, but if it was the systematic application of
technology to agriculture, this again was pioneered under Islam.

"One of the chief causes of the prosperity of the people under the
Islamic regime was the attention given to agriculture. The caliphs
were very enlightened in this respect. They scoured the known world
for new plants or varieties; they fostered with all the means at their
command the use of irrigation; and they protected the peasant in his
modest individual holding of land. They seemed to realize that
agriculture is, indeed, the basic industry." (Stanwood Cobb, Islamic
Contributions to Civilization, Avalon Press, Washington, DC, 1963, p.
79)

CM9. "Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries;
gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a
more equable distribution of the populace over the country."

This sounds like a great idea. As it is, the mass of the populace fled
to city life while political power stayed in the country. The flight
from representation by population perverted democracy and made it
easily skewed and manipulated by the Few. My mound architecture
proposals would allow rapid shifts of the population between rural and
urban conditions when the need arises.

CM10. "Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of
children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of
education with industrial production, etc. "

This no longer sounds very radical, does it? Next time we will look at
how the Communist Manifesto has been edited and changed by just about
everybody, including Marx himself, through the following century and
more than a half, as explained in "Introducing Marxism.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com