30 July, Color-Man, Shanghai
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto is a brilliantly dangerous book. In it, the writers have a passage that explains what Sam and I have seen all over the world, and especially here in China:
"The bourgeoisie," it says, referring to nations of rich, upper middle-class capitalists, "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adapt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst...In one word, it creates a world after its own image. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian countries...dependent on civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."
Their analysis is dead on. Like most dangerous ideas, the foundations they laid for communism were rooted in truth, but were twisted somewhere along the way. But this description is exactly the state of the world, even today.
I'm not sure what's left of "the East." Ghandi once looked to the East to save the world because he considered the West incapable. But democracy, free thought, and free trade (the enemy of communism) are spreading now more than ever, it seems. Nepal, the last Hindu nation, has just become secular. That leaves just hidden Bhutan, the final Buddhist kingdom. Sure, those religions still control millions of people, but politically, the masses have begun to see how those systems just don't work.
It seems that, for now at least, McDonalds and iPods and Hollywood will remain the kings of the world. There may be a better way, but the East has certainly not yet found it. And so the West will continue to create "a world after its own image," or, as is often the case with China, a world surpassing its own image.
Drew
"The bourgeoisie," it says, referring to nations of rich, upper middle-class capitalists, "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adapt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst...In one word, it creates a world after its own image. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian countries...dependent on civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."
Their analysis is dead on. Like most dangerous ideas, the foundations they laid for communism were rooted in truth, but were twisted somewhere along the way. But this description is exactly the state of the world, even today.
I'm not sure what's left of "the East." Ghandi once looked to the East to save the world because he considered the West incapable. But democracy, free thought, and free trade (the enemy of communism) are spreading now more than ever, it seems. Nepal, the last Hindu nation, has just become secular. That leaves just hidden Bhutan, the final Buddhist kingdom. Sure, those religions still control millions of people, but politically, the masses have begun to see how those systems just don't work.
It seems that, for now at least, McDonalds and iPods and Hollywood will remain the kings of the world. There may be a better way, but the East has certainly not yet found it. And so the West will continue to create "a world after its own image," or, as is often the case with China, a world surpassing its own image.
Drew
posted by Unknown at 10:52 PM
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