Barry Rubin: Karl Marx Visits Occupy Wall Street

Karl Marx Visits Occupy Wall Street

By Barry Rubin

November 1989, Moscow

During the Polish anti-Communist revolt, spearheaded by the workers, a joke swept through Poland. According to the story, the Communist dictator couldn’t figure out what to do in order to put down the uprising. So he went to Moscow to visit Lenin’s tomb for inspiration, and the Soviet authorities closed it down to let him meditate there.

“Oh Lenin,” said President Wojciech Jaruzelski, the situation is terrible. “The country is in turmoil, the economy is collapsing, counterrevolutionaries are everywhere, the imperialists are subverting Poland, and the church is backing the revolt. What should I do?”

Suddenly, Lenin, mummified as he was, came to life, sat up, and shouted: “Arm the workers!” 

November 2011, New York City

The bear-like man with wild hair and long beard waddled down the lower Manhattan street. That “old mole,” revolution, had stuck its head up into the air again, sniffed the carbon dioxide-laden firmament, and didn’t scurry back down into the hole. A specter was haunting the world all right.

He was excited to see it first-hand. But the sight was a shock. This was no organized group of class-conscious proletarians, but the flotsam of bourgeois society. Drug users and sex fiends, spoiled brats from the upper bourgeoisie, and anarchists.

He had written about:

“The social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

Perhaps his first impression was misleading or perhaps this movement was indeed a tool of reactionary intrigue. He must investigate further.

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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2012. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media

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