![]() this week: "Seize the means of production." /QNlEtuaOwrĤ0% of the members of union households vote Republican This understandably raised a few eyebrows.ĪFL-CIO last week: It costs $1,200 to build a guillotine. ![]() That tweet, taken on face value, seems to endorse some form of workers' revolution aimed at taking ownership of capital currently held in private hands. The country's largest labor organization apparently found these textbook Marxist talking points convincing enough to tweet out the video, along with the caption "we all need to seize the means of the production." "All workers under capitalism are subject to the same conditions of constantly producing more for as little wage compensation as possible," says Whelan.ĭifferences in income, type of work, or lifestyle that we use to draw distinctions between working- and middle-class wage earners are all a fiction, he goes on to say, created by "the rich and the media" to divide and distract workers from the inherent class conflicts in our society. We all need to seize the means of production. Yesterday, the AFL-CIO tweeted out an explainer video from self-described "anti-capitalist, worker-owned" streaming platform Means TV featuring Dan Whelan, identified as a "Marxist, roofer", explaining that the middle class is actually an illusion spread by the owners of society to divide the working class. ![]() O’Reilly members experience live online training, plus books, videos, and digital content from nearly 200 publishers.The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) has taken a radical turn in a few of its recent social media postings, winking at the idea of airline workers executing their bosses and encouraging the proletariat to literally seize the means of production. Get The Stewardship of Wealth: Successful Private Wealth Management for Investors and Their Advisors, + Website now with the O’Reilly learning platform. Smaller enterprises were generally permitted to remain in private hands. Instead, Europe found a “middle way.” Socialist governments dominated the landscape for many years after World War II and those governments tended to nationalize not the entire economy but only the most important industry sectors-especially banks, infrastructure (transportation, communications, and energy) and large employers. In Western Europe, pure communism in the Marxist sense was never adopted. Unfortunately, once the USSR's simple industrial society found it necessary to evolve into a vastly more complex postindustrial society (to compete with the United States), top-down command strategies proved to be no match for bottom-up free market strategies, and the USSR went the way of the dodo bird. ![]() And for a while, this worked magnificently, as Russia evolved from a backward, peasant society into the second most powerful country in the world in less than 30 years (1917–1945). Such a revolution actually did occur in Russia, and the state did in fact ban private property. When this happened, the workers would seize control of the government, ban private ownership, and all profits would thereafter accrue to the state, which would redistribute the wealth far more broadly. Marx famously believed that conflicts between the middle-class owners of productive enterprises (the “bourgeoisie”) and the workers in those enterprises (the “proletariat”) would result in the collapse of capitalism.
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