| | Caveat: To be precise, Engels was a co-author, but I'm overlooking that fact above and below.
What Marx is saying here is that what leaders should do is things that actually hurt the country, because the extra pain you will be causing (unnecessary, man-made pain) will itself artificially create crises leading to more opportunities to do more of what you wanted to do before but couldn't. This is not dissimilar to a cocaine dealer giving you the first "hit" for free -- all the time knowing full well the discomfort you will begin to feel as you come down from your first "high." It is this discomfort that he seeks to give you, this pain -- because that is something he can really profit from (by selling you more cocaine). Some of the things you could do to accomplish this might be things like:
--During an economic slowdown, demand increases in the minimum wage.
--During an economic slowdown, circumvent large projects -- such as projects for job-boosting, transcontinental pipelines and restrict energy production with moratoriums.
--During an economic slowdown, punish productivity by increasing corporate taxation either through traditional means or through a "carbon tax."
Marx is setting the stage for his 10 pillars of communism, listed on the next page and radically "paraphrased" below:
1) Create a situation, or a crisis, where everyone owes their home mortgage to a government-sponsored entity.
2) Make the tax code progressive (or even more progressive).
3) Implement an estate tax (or increase the one you have).
4) Implement an emigration tax (or increase the one you have).
5) Centralize credit with a national bank and do whatever it is that you can do in order to force small banking institutions out of business, and to control the few, large banking institutions that remain after your artificial, financial onslaught.
6a) Force communications companies to reveal personal records of their customers' communications, making hundreds of thousands of requests and demands each year.
6b) Make all transport state-monitored, such as demanding that all new cars sold have the kind of "black boxes" that you find in airplanes.
7) Extension of factories owned by the state, along with an address to the nation that you want to increase factory work in the nation.
8) Create industrial armies, pitting some industries against other industries, making everyone in the country vulnerable to the plight of everyone working in a given industry. Use tax-payer dollars, if necessary (hell, even if it isn't necessary!) to enrich members of unions -- even if they are crushing the viability of an industry.
9) Gradual abolition of town and country, with steps such as universal internet access (paid for with tax dollars).
10) Implement free education for all children (or increase the scope of free education to include pre-school).
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 2/13, 7:48pm)
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... this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
