A Post Thanksgiving Marxist IQ by Norman Markowitz

by: Saturday 24 November 2012

 

 

1.       A decade after the Pilgrims  landed at Plymouth Rock, Britain was in the throes of a revolution which Marx and Engels saw as

a.       a revolution for the hell of it

b.      A workers and peasants socialist revolution

c.       The first major bourgeois political revolution in history

d.      A democratic revolution

 

2.       In the U.S. anti-colonial revolution, the most thorough going bourgeois democratic revolutionary ideas were seen in the writings of

a.Benjamin  Franklin

b. Thomas Jefferson

c. Tom Paine

d. George Washington

 

3.       During the American War, Republican leaderThaddeus Stevens represented the most advanced revolutionary democratic position because he advocated

a.       abolishing slavery completely

b.      giving the former slaves full citizenship rights

c.       Breaking up the large slave plantations and distributing the land to the former slaves

d.      All of the above

4.       In a position that in many ways borrowed directly from Socialists, Wisconsin anti-monopoly Governor ,Senator and later Progressive Party leader Robert La Follette, Sr. called his policy

a.       “Share Our Wealth”

b.       “democratic capitalism”

c.        “Economic Democracy”

d.      “No Taxation Without Representation”

 

5.        If Marx and Engels had lived through the 20th century and seen the Communist Party, USA, from its inception to the present, they would in all probability liken its struggles to what U.S. political group of their lifetime.

a.       The utopian socialists

b.      The Jacksonian Democrats

c.       The abolitionists

d.      The Social Darwinists

 

 

Answers to last week's Marxist IQ

1.c

2.c

3.c

4.a

5.a

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  • 1.c
    2.c
    3.d
    4.c
    5.c

    An excellent historical and contextual tool for the 17th century activities that push us to celebrate Thanksgiving is the Suppression of the African Slave Trade by our very own Communist genius-W. E. B. Du Bois.
    Du Bois ties the primitive accumulation of capitalism, with Marx to this Slave Trade, as Marx does, using Capital, Volume 1, chap. 31.
    That the atrocities in England, and flight of Britons to colonial lands, happens in the wake of other capitalist horrors is no secret, and the the brilliant Massachusett Du Bois joins with the hospitality of Massachusetts in the early 17th century, welcoming escaping Pilgrims, joining with the brilliant Marx in theory.
    Marx ends chapter 31, tying in child slavery in England(which our Pilgrims may have wanted to escape)to commercial slavery in the new world.
    "Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
    Tantae molis erat, to establish the "eternal laws of Nature" of the capitalist mode of production,k to complete the process of separation between labourers and the conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into "free labouring poor," that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, "comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,"capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."
    Brother Markowitz, the comparison of the Abolitionists is appreciated-and closely related to Du Bois's career documentation of the long anti-racist history of the Western World-from the Huguenots to Thadeus Stevens and Charles Sumner to John Brown.

    Posted by E.E.W. Clay, 11/26/2012 6:00pm (12 years ago)

  • 1. c

    2. c

    3. d

    4. c

    5. c

    Posted by Sean Mulligan, 11/26/2012 5:57am (12 years ago)

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