Some comments:
This is the view of modern Left: enemy is always the capitalist, and “workers of all lands” have to unite to overthrow the capitalist. But this view actually serves the capitalists: capital means power, and power today is primarily international. It is international capital that is dangerous to workers’ rights, not small and medium, national businessmen. But this stance of Manifesto, that history is based on class struggle, is obvious in today’s progressivism: ethnicity and race do not exist; entire humanity is human race; culture is irrelevant; immigration is good; immigrants, blacks etc. are being exploited by big bad capitalists. The classist and international nature of Marxism have left the Left wide open to exploitation by the very capitalists they profess to oppose.
I don't think this is true, there are plenty of people and groups on the left that are very focused on ethnicity, race, the importance of culture, etc. There's something of a marxist influence on that focus in that they have a habit of framing everything in terms of oppression by external parties and hating traitors to the ethnical/racial/etc cause, but the view of the left diverges considerably from marxism itself.
Unlike what Marx states, the relationship between the colonization and the markets was a reinforcing loop: hunger for markets was caused by the development of manufacture and industry, but once colonization began it fed said development. Burgoeise did tear apart natural ties which formed feudal, patriarchal, idylic relations of old: only money remained, as a replacement for family and honour. Instead of God, culture and tradition, there are new gods – money and free trade, instead of culture there is hedonism, and instead of tradition there is emptiness to be “filled” by PR experts, by logos and by illogical wants. Occupation has become a mere job, something to be done with no honour and no enjoyment, merely to satisfy basic animalistic needs of the body.
I'm not sure how you're getting "unlike what Marx states" at several points here, such as the bolded line, because that's exactly in line with what Marx has said: "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.......Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him."
Cosmopolitan character of consumption and production in every country has also robbed it of soul, of humanity. Industries no longer utilize not just indigenous raw material, but also indigenous workforce neither. Materials and workers are both imported from abroad, and this globalist exploitation is given a veil of legitimacy by covering it in terms such as “humanitarian”, “refugees”, “aid” and so on. New wants – which are nothing new today, being a product of 19th century colonialism – indeed require for their satisfaction the products of new lands and climes. Nations are no longer self-sufficient, but are universally interdependent. This interdependence is presented as a good thing, as something that will help prevent future wars – but it was just as strong in 1848. when Europe bled due to revolutions, and in early 1900s when The Great War – later renamed World War I – had started. So neither free trade nor open borders can be thought of as a guarantee of peace. In fact, they are dangerous to peace because they promote contact, and contact means conflict. At the same time, reduction in “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness”, as Marx had put it, leads to loss of intellectual diversity alongside the cultural and biological diversity.
The traditional defense/justification for globalism is not "it's humanitarian aid", it's that global trade is a net benefit to everyone in the long run by leverage comparative advantage on an international scale (with the traditional criticism being that everyone generally better off doesn't address the issue of the few people that are specifically worse off). The underlined bit is confusing, it's an accepted and well documented fact in economics that human wants are unlimited because that's simply the nature of man, not because of some side effect of colonialism.
The bolded bit, however, I find truly objectionable. Very few states are self sufficient, and those are have only emerged in the modern era, when technology and widespread education allowed truly massive nation states to form and be effectively controlled and administered. Before that point (and still today, just to a moderately lesser degree) international trade for resources lacking in one area was essential and has never not been the case, with some of the most well documented early international trade dating back to the bronze age. It is true that trade does not ensure peace, it merely makes war and conflict less likely. But an ideological demand that states be fully self-sufficient
ensures war, as the only way to gain needed resources is to seize them from others.
The consequence of agglomeration of population was – as Marx states – political centralization, with independent but loosely connected provinces lumped together into nation-states. Means of production also developed, creating capitalism. Both urbanization and centralization led to dehumanization of the society and concentration of political power. The process however did not stop at nation-states or even states. It has continued throughout 19th, 20th and 21st century, with current state of massive, overarching, utterly undemocratic and inhumane supranational organizations. Instead of nation-states which provided safe havens for ethnic groups in increasingly connected world, politics are increasingly dominated by supranational and international organizations that leave both group and individual bare naked towards elements of a globalized world.
International and supranational groups have influence, but this is by no means a new thing, with the most obvious example being religion. However, it bears noting that while they are more common today then ever before, that doesn't translate to them being more powerful than before, what little authority they possess is useless once states decide they want to do something else. The most recent example (aside of course from the perpetually toothless and useless UN) of this being the NGO "search and rescue" groups that were in reality little more than a globalist immigration scheme. Nation states caught onto that fact, and crushed them in short order.
Modern industry had led – for the first time in history – to an epidemic of overproduction. This then necessitated propaganda and thought control, transformation of a human being into a consumer. Individual, culture and society itself have come to service the machine of production. More than that, it has come to destroy the culture, replacing it with an artificial construct of machinery, so that products from one place can be sold all over the world. Globalist capitalist has created “equality” and other ideals of the modern Left so as to accomodate the people to him instead of accomodating himself to the people.
This is, again, straight from Marx himself: "Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells". He, and you, get it wrong. Overproduction is a
strength of the capitalist system, not a flaw. Mass manufacture makes shortages less likely/impossible, drives prices down via economies of scale (most firms will actually produce more than then can sell, as a result of targetting production numbers based on manufacturing efficiency and not sales), and allows greater choice by customers as they can pick between not just different, competing products and pick the one that suits them best, but pick the best item amoung it's type (this is particularly important with food. Overproduction means consumers have access to the best fresh food, rather than "well, we have enough apples for everyone, but someone's get stuck with the bag full of bruised ones).
As for the notion that capitalists have sought to mind control people into becoming mindless consumers for their own nefarious purposes....um, no? if that was true, they would not overproduce to the point they can not only have unsold inventory, but that they expect to do so and have to spend yet more money to manage the excess. Futhermore, you would expect that prior to the era when this became possible and the mind control was not needed because production was limited, advertising would be different because the customers would have a differant mindset that needed to be appealed to....but this doesn't seem to be the case, we have examples of advertising from ancient rome that are still recognizable and oddly similar to contemporary adds.
The divorce of the capital from the land has led to modern slavery in sweatshops of China and Indonesia, where workers are – more than ever before – appendages of the machine. This situation is nothing new, Marx himself has already noted it. What is new is the transnational nature of capital, which is able to run away whenever presented with demands. As a consequence, improvement in conditions of workers is nearly impossible. Large corporations are also capable of destroying, squeezing out most of small local competition, thus destroying the last vestiges of humanity in the economy. And new developments threaten the existence of humans at all. If artificial intelligence ever achieves human intellect, human workforce will become superfluous and may well be exterminated.
This isn't true, at all. Yes, capital is more mobile than land, but that's going from "immobile" to "mobile at considerable cost". You can't just pick up and move an entire factory or the like every time the locals get uppity, factories are expensive investments that you can't just write off, nor are they easily sold at anything approaching what they actually cost. This is backed up by what happens in actual international trade, where demands by local nation states that international companies take certain actions to improve work conditions result in the companies improving working conditions. Granted, they do it on the cheap and as little as they can get away with, but they still do it rather than run. Nor are their operations a net downside to the local workers, in fact it's the opposite....which only makes sense. If the international factory was worse than local competition, no one would work there, and if the international firm tried getting clever by being better at first and then exploiting people once the local competition was gone, then they're screwed in the long run. Once you get a reputation for doing that, no one else will let you build a factory in thier country.
Also, the 1% will just murder us all and replace us with machines....really?
Immigration steals strength from the people, as it destroys the common ground of origin, heritage and culture which they require to organize. Even trade unions become impossible. What is left under the spectre of “civic nationalism” are the institutions, and these are inevitably under control the capitalists. Any form of large-scale organization thus becomes impossible, and what is left is merely an individual, vulnerable, broken and alone. Marxism, with its misunderstanding of history and non-understanding of culture, had helped prepare the ground for the victory of its enemy. Even the economic crises, on which Marx had so relied, merely help the capital in concentrating wealth and power in its hands – after each new crisis, people are poorer and capitalists wealthier. Small businessmen do not have the capital to survive the crises and thus become victims of large capitalists, with the end result of constriction of competition and establishment of socialism for large corporations as they use mechanisms of democracy to subvert the state to their needs.
While I have issues with elements of modern immigration, this isn't one of them. There are plenty of countries in the world with fairly open immigration polices, strong national identities, and unions. Europe being the obvious example. You are correct in that throwing open the floodgates and letting in anyone and everyone is not a good idea because a flood of new arrivals risks eroding the host nation's norms and culture. The answer to that is slower, more controlled immigration that lets people in at a rate that ensures they assimilate into rather than replace the host culture. Not "no immigration ever".
But revolutions never created anything successful. Rather, they always destroyed the existing structures and ushered in new tyranny. And in any case, in modern society there can be no “Communist revolution”: working class is a minority, and is in any case not revolutionary in its nature. Left relies on large capitalists, uneducated university students and equally uneducated professors, and on idealists with no idea of reality. It has been wholly subverted and coopted by the international business class, to whom the only true danger is the traditional Right: not the conservative civic-nationalist center, but rather the traditionalist, ethnonationalist and religions Right.
Excuse me?
Yes, revolutions don't always succeed, but that's not the same as "never".
As for the intenational business class and who can threaten it.....the uneducated college class that has a tagential at best relationship to reality got AOC elected. Whereas based on what you've written here, your definition of the "traditional right" sounds fairly close to what the rest of us call fascism, and the fascists are nowhere close to having power no matter what MSNPC says.
Communists are by nature internationalists. As Marx had written: “1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independent of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle for the working class against the burgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole”. They deny the value of individual self-determination, as for nations so for individuals: individual property is to be abolished: “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”. True, this is supposed to only hold true for the capital, or rather economic property as opposed to private one. But that means abolishment of the small enterpraneuer, and thus the possibility of an individual rising with his own skills. On the other hand, free trade can be and is dangerous, but not for the reasons Marx has considered it dangerous. It is dangerous because it increases the scope of the capital and its reach: divisions which will have appeared in a nation-state are, thanks to the global free trade, multiplied and increased to unimaginable levels. Unlike the capitalist free trade and Communist no trade (abolition of trade), fettered traders of the Middle Ages were productive while not being disruptive. It was only when free trade was pushed that trade became dangerous: Venetians, in their pursuit of the free trade, used Crusaders to sack Constantinople and thus opened up first Anatolia and then the Balkans to invasion by armies of Islam. This sin was not and could not be erased by Venetian participation in symbolically important but strategically meaningless Battle of Lepanto.
Pinning the sack of Constantinople just on Venice and ignoring all of the other factors that lead up to it sounds like a dangerously oversimplified narrative. Secondly, trade in the middle ages was enormously disruptive to the established order, it simply lacked the power to force the issue until the black death crippled the older order and weakened their political and military power.
Abolition of family is another notion which Marx put forward that is accepted by modern-day progressives. To Marx, family is based on capital, on private gain. He does not accept – and may not even understand – the psychological, sociological, educational and cultural value of family. In attempting to do away with family, Marx has – once again – appropriated one of the most destructive aspects of modern capitalism. He correctly saw that the industry of his age was destroying the family, but instead of defending the family, he opted to join the destruction.
I'd like to know why you believe the contemporary destruction of the family is rooted in the industrial revolution rather than sexual revolution, which is what I've seen get blamed far more often.
And as already noted, family is not the only traditional social structure which Marx wanted to abolish. He stated that “workingmen have no country”, but that is blatantly false: country, with its borders, its tariffs, its customs and its political elite positioned within the reach of the masses, is the only possible defense working class has against international capitalists and financial elites. His following statement, that “National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.”, is nothing short of hilarious considering that it was followed – not seventy years later – by two devastating global wars, which were caused in large part precisely thanks to the freedom of commerce and the global market. Nor is antagonism between nations driven by antagonism within nations, else both empires of old and today’s Western states – all highly multicultural – would have been engaged in constant warfare. Thus, contrary to Marx’s statement, exploitation between individuals has no causal connection to exploitation between states.
As I said before, international trade will not prevent war, but your system will ensure it.
Marx’s rejection of permanent patterns of all societies is rather idiotic. Ideas which are common to all societies are common because they are required for functioning of the society. Destruction of these patterns will not – as Marx posits – be either result or the cause of the end of class antagonisms. Rather, their destruction will lead to destruction of human society itself.
Patterns like greed and unlimited desires and wants being universal across all observed cultures, perhaps?