The fraidy cat blocker who is afraid even of the delete key
One of the many Tom, Dick and Harry's brief history of Communism, means nothing
Stan the Socialist
-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Ristad <ristad@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: sparkscoffee <sparkscoffee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thu, Dec 31, 2015 9:45 am
Subject: [sparkscoffee] Marx's Funeral
A brief history of Communism. -RR
By Gary North
Karl Marx is sometimes referred to as a secular prophet. He made lots of
predictions. Most of them were wrong.
He died in obscurity.
Following the death of his wife, Jenny, in December 1881, Marx developed a
catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last 15 months of his life. It
eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on
14 March 1883 (age 64). He died a stateless person; family and friends in
London buried his body in Highgate Cemetery, London, on 17 March 1883. There
were between nine and eleven mourners at his funeral.
His ideas spread, but not the way he foresaw.
Marx was opposed to democratic politics. He saw democracy as
anti-revolutionary. His system presented a religion of revolution.
His ideas were successful in agrarian Russia. Yet his theory insisted that the
proletarian revolution would take place in advanced industrial nations. It
never did. It took place in rural Russia (1917) and China (1949).
Almost no one other than a handful of German socialists, the librarians at the
British Museum, and the police knew who he was in 1883.
Lenin was no democrat. He was a revolutionary. Of some 3,000 revolutionaries
followed by the police of Europe in the late 19th century, he was the only one
ever to organize a successful revolution.
Lenin made Marx famous in retrospect. Lenin was committed to the religion of
revolution, but in agrarian Russia, not Western Europe.
Was Marx a success? His theories were wrong. His predictions were wrong. But he
posthumously captured the mind of a 21-year-old college grad in Russia. By
1950, a third of the world's population lived under officially Marxist regimes.
