The Young Karl Marx

Started by RE Nov 04, 2026, 02:25 AM

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Just finished watching an HBO movie on the early years of the collaboration between Karl Marx & Friederich Engels and the Birth of the Communist Party.  After watching the full film two thing stood out most.

First, how Capitalism as it began with the Industrial Revolution and the application of the Energy of Fossil Fuel truly was based on Wage Slavery, which in many ways was even worse than explicit slavery.  In the case of explicit slaves, each one represented a significant financial investment by the person who bought one.  If that slave died after a milling machine scalped him or ripped off his arm the first day of work, the owner took a big financial hit having to buy a new one to replace him.  With wage slavery, if a worker died on the job there was always another one outside the door ready to work for whatever the owner would pay.  Poor People were always in unlimited supply, and we all know the supply-demand equation.  No pricing power.

Second is that contrary to popular belief Communism DID NOT FAIL!  It's the workers movement over the latter half of the 19th Century that put a stop to the worst abuses of the Capitalist system.  It's the FEAR of workers organizing and taking control over property that forced the Bourgeois to make changes in work hours, job safety and pensions in order to maintain their control over the system and their ability to extract most of the wealth from an enterprise, while the workers responsible for that success earned only enough to survive.  An improvement over the condition of dying by the truckload of course, but only a partial victory.

The complete victory never arrived either, despite the attempts made in places  like the Soviet Union and China.  In both cases there though, it was a vast improvement over the Monarchies they succeeded, and the failures were in many ways engineered by Capitalists who undermined the ideals through war, theft, bribery & corruption.  Now as Capitalism is in its Death Throes swimming under the mountain of debt it built over the last 200 years, it's ability to stop the inevitable victory of Communism is vastly diminished.

Below is the trailer.  Full film also available on UTube for a fee.



RE

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