There's a great piece by Bob Burnett at Huffington Post entitled Roll Over, Karl Marx.
In the thirties and forties, the American Left embraced Marxist ideas, but in the fifties Communism and Marxism fell out of favor; first because of revelations about the genocidal policies of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin and then due to the "red scare" launched by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Okay, that's where I came in. My parents were middle class. My father had a university education -- rare in those days -- and managed a store; my mother was a homemaker until the late fifties, like almost all women. Politically, they were lefties who had suffered growing up during the Great Depression. I sympathized with them, admired them, and wanted to emulate them, but the general public's anti-Communist feeling was too strong. Politically, I became a pale version of my parents, with leftist leanings but also going with the popular flow.
"Marxism" was a dirty word. Support in Canada for my parents' CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) -- or my generation's version of it, the NDP (New Democratic Party) -- was as far as public opinion would tolerate. So while in my politically formative years I read a little -- a very little -- about Marx and Marxism, it was with a very jaundiced eye. After all, Marx's predicted revolution had led to terrible circumstances for the people of Russia, and to the horror of Stalinism.
When I was a young man -- well, let's take 1976. I was 28 years old. As a construction laborer, I felt on top of the world. I worked long hours in a short construction season in northern Canada. (Not too much outdoor work goes on when it's 40 or 50 below -- and I'm not talking about that wimpy "wind chill factor.") I belonged to LIUNA, the Laborers International Union of North America. I earned what I thought was a very decent income, although I had to work long hours and sought out jobs with overtime pay.
Single, rootless, with no dependents, I was, in a modest kind of way, what was known as a "boomer": rather than simply seek work in my local area, I traveled across western Canada looking for big projects with long hours and big money. (Five years later, in 1981, I was earning $10,000 a month on pipeline work. I've since taken some training and entered a white-collar profession that I enjoy and that has allowed me to travel extensively, self-employed, to jobs in Europe and Asia -- I guess I'm still a boomer! -- and I have earned even more than that a handful of times; but I haven't averaged anything approaching that over the past 20 years.)
In 1976, at the age of 28, the world looked good. I bought a brand-new Dodge van with a 318 engine; I had a carpenter friend furnish the interior in cedar, with a propane tank that powered my fridge and the furnace that provided great comfort in camping areas at ski resorts in two western provinces and eight states -- from 10 below to toasty warm in ten minutes! It also had a killer sound system. If I wasn't skiing in my winters off from construction, I was living in my van, skydiving at drop zones from California to Florida. 1976 was when I met the lady who became my wife, and she traveled with me. Ah, yes, nights under a down duvet at Jackson Hole or Park City, Perris Valley or Zephyrhills. (Those last two are drop zones in California and Florida.) And while I was eligible for, and collected, big unemployment benefits in the winter because my high-paid work was seasonal, I never cheated and collected benefits while I was vacationing.
Working as a lowly laborer -- looked down on by even my fellow workers, the Operators and Teamsters -- life looked good. The obvious path before me was to get promotions on the job and become a foreman and then a superintendent, always with the prospect of starting my own company, alone or with fellow construction workers.
In 1929, the wealthiest 1% of Americans controlled 44% of the wealth. After the progressive era, FDR's New Deal, and liberal economic policies generally, culminating in LBJ's Great Society, in 1976, the wealthiest 1% of Americans controlled 20% of the wealth. "We the people" were doing pretty well! Good homes, new cars, boats and other toys -- airplanes! -- that was what it was like in those days. A decade later, in the harsh days of the pro-elite and anti-worker Reagan administration, while I was going to school -- working construction in the summers and taking classes in Jacksonville, Florida, in the winters -- I read an op-ed that sneeringly stated how naive we had been to think that we lowly workers could live comfortably and well: "Every plumber thought he should have a condo at Whistler next door to his doctor."
Well, I wasn't a plumber; I was a laborer. And yes, that's what working people thought in those golden days.
But I digress. Back to Bob Burnett, who expresses the core of Marx's theory as follows:
Marx examined the human condition from the perspective of economics. An idealist, he emphasized "universal" principles of group dynamics. He was fascinated by class struggle and capitalism. Influenced by Hegel, Marx subscribed to the concept of inevitability and predicted that capitalism would produce class conflict causing a socialist revolution.
Marx viewed industrial society as a constant struggle between workers (the proletariat) and capitalists (the bourgeoisie). He argued that capitalism always produced a small number of rich and powerful capitalists; if not counteracted, this concentration of power inevitably caused class polarization and, ultimately, a revolution that would destroy capitalism and produce socialism.
Hello? I thought I was sitting comfortably in my chair, reading HuffPo; why am I sitting on the floor with these bells ringing in my head?
Oh, yeah. I remember now. I was reading that Marx thing.
There's a lot more in the article. Please read it here.