Cloward-Piven

I was reading the Smallest Minority this morning.

 

There's a classic Marxist dialectic for you: that some sort of inevitable march of history will cause a class warfare which can only break through into a true socialist paradise when conditions get so bad that the proletariat rebells violently against the bourgousie.

 

activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.

 

In other words, Marx predicted Malthusian conditions and welcomed them as a precursor to tearing down the entire system of class privilege he saw around him in 1890s Germany. What he somehow couldn't see was a society *not built upon hereditary class* spontaneously evolving from capitalism and free markets. Such as we used to have here.

 

Patriotism really means trying to tear down the system by any means possible. gah.

 

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The difference between theory and practice, is much greater in practice than in theory...