I've said it once, and I'll say it again.
Good people, things will never go well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fir bread; and we oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 9:57, 4 replies)

amen sir!
a bold utterance, and true.
( sanityclause is waiting until, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 10:23, closed)

True then, not so much now
If you a warm house and wine and spices and fir bread, the only way you'll get them is by working for someone else and the only way you'll get more is by working harder. Nobody these days has much leisure and you'd be hard pressed to find much of a landed gentry to enserf the proletariat either.

Capitalism has achieved much in bringing about the end that Marx wanted, including funding the state that provides the net for those unable to work. The means probably weren't what he'd have expected. He was writing of geniuine suffering and grievance, but 'Marxists' today do not have that legitimacy.
( Scrumper, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 12:03, closed)

not if you count
the Third World, which I think is about 2/3 of people...and even then there's real, '19th century style' poverty in the First World.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 15:40, closed)

Yes fair point
I, like Marx, was talking about England. If you take the wider world, including bits of the first world (USA especially), then I agree that it's hardly right for us to sit back, put our feet up and declare 'job done.'

Although that's exactly what I'm going to do now, because it's Friday afternoon. Pub time. Have a good weekend and a *click* for a post that's nothing like the others.
( Scrumper, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 16:20, closed)