 Today I received an email, with an attachment in PowerPoint - you know, the popular vehicle of spam nowadays. You come across a paragraph, a quote of some sort , or an incredible picture of a shark jumping out to bite that surfer, or that levitating dude, or a bird with a smiling face. And it is so amazing, so life changing that you feel the unbearable urge to share it with the rest of the world. So you copy & paste it to a Power Point presentation, put a nice, new agey background music, a couple of pictures fading in and out, and paste that amazing thing and start circulating this masterpiece to your friends. And before you know it, your handywork is all over the planet and you have a dedicated zombie following, not even knowing your name, but adhoring your work, seeing the light in that quote, just like you. Well, I don't think you'd be surprised to find out that you are not alone in your sparmorgasmic colicitatsharinology. Almost everybody does this. Internet is full of crap, blogs are full of crap like the one you loved - take my site for example. And you know what? Most of the time a little research reveals that your beloved quote, or that fantastic work of photography is fake, fabricated; purposely to trick people like yourself. Much like the "if they can't find bread, let them eat pasta" quote - which was fabricated by an attention hungry journalist.
The presentation I received consisted of an interesting quote, attributed to Karl Marx, primarily his astonishing 3 volume work, Das Kapital. Here's the quote that is all around the forums, BBs and whatnots, and was pasted on that presentation:
"Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable.
The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
- Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867"
Considering the current financial crisis, the credit crunch and the way the entire global economy is going down | the drain, especially in a "socialism-fobic" country like the US, the quote above is entertaining much attention. People are LOVIN' IT!
Sorry to rain on your parade fellas; I don't know to whom this quote belongs, but it's not Karl Marx's.
I had read Das Kapital, a long time ago, and I do not remember such a paragraph. Anybody who hasn't read it, should be tipped off by the usage of the words such as "credit", "debt", "technology" in such a philosophical and mathematical work produced before 1900s. Inside Das Kapital, the word "technology" is present only in the 1st volume and not in a "commodity" context, it occurs once in the 2nd volume and is non-existent in the 3rd volume. Anyway, I downloaded the texts again and did a thorough search just to indulge my curiosity. And I could not find the above paragraph, or anything that remotely resembles it.
So, if anybody out there knows exactly where in the texts this paragraph is (maybe there is a translation issue, the original was in German, what I read is in English) please let me know.
Until then, you morons, please stop believing everything you hear or read and learn to do a little research for yourself. If you are too lazy to read Das Kapital, I am sorry to inform you, but you should not be quoting from it. Instead, try quoting from right wing conservatist or left wing ultra liberal's blogged mumblings. They are much more fun to read. Leave the serious texts to serious minds.
Now, where is that cartoon...
Oh, I also read through the Communist Manifest, once again, just in case. The paragraph is not there either.
For those who are interested, here's where you can download the texts and other works by Marx and Engels. And one more thing, Marx died long before the invention of socialism and the realization of communism. His theoretical work is beautiful, a pinnacle of human evolution. The atrocity and the monstrocity brought upon humanity by the Polit Party in former SSSR and other communist countries and the manifestation of Iron Curtain has nothing to do with Karl Marx, or communism. You have Stalin to thank for that; don't confuse fact with fiction.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/
Lest we forget; "liberty will die to a thunderous applause".
Cheerios |
