“In order to live, human beings must produce. People cannot live by bread alone but neither can they live without bread. This does not mean all human activity can be reduced to material motives but that all activity is linked to a material base. A work of art may have no direct economic motive attached to it, yet its creation would be impossible if there did not exist the material conditions that allowed the artist to create and show the work to interested audiences who have the time for art.”

And in a class society, the wealth so produced by many is accumulated in the hands of relatively
few who soon translate their economic power into political and cul­tural power in order to better secure the exploitative social order that so favors them.

Those who reject Marx frequently contend that his predictions about proletariat revolution have proven wrong. From this, they conclude that his analysis of the nature of capitalism and imperial­ism must also be wrong. But we should distinguish between Marx the chiliastic thinker, who made grandly optimistic predictions about the flowering of the human condition, and Marx the econo­mist and social scientist, who provided us with fundamental insights into capitalist society that have held painfully true to the present day. The latter Marx has been regularly misrepresented by anti-Marxist writers.

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RandomPoster33@RandomPoster33·15mMichael Parenti writes on P. 125 of “Blackshirts and Reds”: “Those who reject Marx frequently contend that his predictions about proletariat revolution have proven wrong. From this, they conclude that his analysis of the nature of capitalism and imperial­ism must also be… 1/RandomPoster33@RandomPoster33·14m…wrong. But we should distinguish between Marx the chiliastic thinker, who made grandly optimistic predictions about the flowering of the human condition, and Marx the econo­mist and social scientist, who provided us with fundamental insights into capitalist society that… 2/RandomPoster33@RandomPoster33·11m…have held painfully true to the present day. The latter Marx has been regularly misrepresented by anti-Marxist writers.” Parenti bashes Marx, characterizing him as chiliastic! Parenti rejects Marx on the proletarian revolution, the central focus of his work. 3/RandomPoster33@RandomPoster33·7mHe then graciously offers to save “the latter Marx” from his own vicious appraisal. He acknowledges feeling the pain of Marx’s appraisal as he defends capitalism not from social science but its real enemy: proletarian revolution. Whatever other mistakes Parenti makes in his 4/RandomPoster33@RandomPoster33defense of Marx from those who would “reject” him, or from Parenti’s own hostility towards revolution, we must trace back to this central stand. Proletarian revolution has and will continue to overthrow capitalist governments through the work of Marxist revolutionary parties. 5/5

A further note: Marx did not write Capital in order to study social sciences at a university. He wrote it in relation to what Lenin saw as the main problem early in his political career: the struggle against terrorism, populism, and anarchism. He sought to break the active revolutionary movement from anarchism by putting capitalism in a historical context on the road to socialism. He sought to fight populism by breaking the revolution from a peasant-led to a proletariat-led movement. He also sought to fight terrorism by proving that, not revolutionary anger but the natural breakdown of the economically unstable and morally unjust capitalist system led to a natural uprising of the working class. These three enemies of the socialist revolution proved too powerful to overcome until the rise of the Leninist party decades later.