Communism not dead...yet

By Joseph Gauger
Collegian Staff
April 4, 2007

On March 29, The New York Times published a report entitled “Income Gap Widening, Data Shows,” which explains that, by several criteria, the disparity of wealth in the United States has reached its most egregious level since the start of the Great Depression. While the average income for the lower 90 percent of the U.S. population dropped slightly in 2006, the report said, incomes for the top 10 percent increased impressively, and the incomes of the top one percent rose so sharply that their progress outweighed the ground lost by the lower economic strata and gave the country a positive growth rate for income last year.

Since Plato’s Republic, political scientists have noted the instability of a society in which wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small group. As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policies pointed out in the Times article, the shift in gross income has been coupled with tax policies which push wealth toward the wealthy and cuts to social services utilized disproportionately by the poor.

The implementation of a welfare state was vital in preventing the expansion of the Communist Party in the United States. Communism evolved from discontent in industrial societies with the inequitable distribution of wealth. Seeing that class conflict had been prominent throughout recorded history, Karl Marx and his followers predicted that the institution of private property would inevitably be abolished after a bloody revolution. Marx wrote in his Manifesto of the Communist Party that the “Spectre of Communism” was haunting European nations. In view of the economic trends in the United States, a similar observation could be made today about our own country.

Marx believed that capitalist society was irredeemable, and that it must be smashed and dismantled by the proletariat and replaced with the edifice of a classless society. For the brutal, authoritarian communist parties of the 20th century, no surfeit of blood was too high a price to pay for this revolution. What Marx failed, or refused, to acknowledge was that the group he referred to as “bourgeois socialists” would win out by making concessions to the working class in order to maintain the social order and, in effect, save capitalism.

Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany, no friend of the common man, was an early advocate of this approach. Even those who fail to see the ethical importance of the welfare state cannot ignore the fact that it is good social policy. Putting aside the injustice of rewarding record profits with tax breaks in the face of growing poverty and hunger in this country, responsible social programs lessen political unrest. The New Deal represented a more enlightened economic model, without the callous disregard of laissez-faire capitalism or the impractical idealism (not to mention violence and oppression) of communism.

After a long, backward period as one of the only nations without universal health coverage, nationalized health care has finally entered the U.S. political debate as a viable, mainstream policy. Science Times wrote on March 26 that every Democratic candidate for president has announced a plan to provide every American with health insurance. This is a comforting indication that American politicians have not entirely abandoned the needs of the public in favor of their corporate donors. The more willing our government is to maintain responsible social policies, the less vulnerable we will be to the violent, extremist ideas of 20th century communism. As long as it continues on its current path, it invites such opposition.

As a final comment, I must beg the reader’s pardon for such stubborn propriety, but the word “data” is the plural of “datum,” meaning a statistic or piece of information. The New York Times is, for better or worse, the nation’s preeminent daily newspaper and should not allow errors in subject-verb agreement to appear in its headlines.

gaugerj1@lasalle.edu