By Bosco – The Irish Sentinel –
Over the last number of decades, the communists, in all their different guises (Solidarity, People before Profit, Sinn Fein, Labour, the Workers party etc) have inveigled their way into the minds of the Irish working class. Of course, one might reply to this accusation with a resounding “obviously!”. The implication in the reply would be that the communist parties are the voice of the working class but this where the substance of the reply would fall short.
We recently saw a People Before Profit (PBP) TD, Gino Kenny, snigger at a constituent who admitted he gave the politician his vote. In this once instance, the true representation of the communist politician was unveiled. The constituent should have known from the start that any politician whose name would remind him of an early 19th century Italian ice cream vendor may not be the best choice to represent the views of the ordinary decent Irish working man.
More importantly, the likes of Kenny and his far-left loyalties are never ever confined to the interests of the local. A communist’s constituency is the international commune. This is why many communists, of what ever franchise, Sinn Fein or PBP etc prefers to promote the interests of everyone but those who he is elected to represent. The old left would have been the first on the pickets to join the locals because mass immigration means only one thing: an assault on the welfare of the indigenous working classes.
An oddity amongst the far-left in Ireland is that many of the most notorious members of the communist nomenklatura are privately educated ex alumni; Mary Lou McDonald (Sinn Fein leader) was educated at the very exclusive Notre Dame Des Missions in Churchtown, South Dublin, Ivana Bacik ( Labour leader) is an ex alumnus of Alexandra College, Paul Murphy attended St Killian’s German School in Clonskeagh, and Richard Boyd Barrett went to St Michael’s College on the exclusive Aylesbury Road in Dublin 4. These are the well off who, apparently represent, the working classes.
The retort to accusations of hypocrisy by the aforementioned benefactors of early privilege, is that THEY didn’t chose where to go to school, their parents did. This doesn’t cut the mustard, because the aforementioned clearly benefitted from their upbringing and education. It is important to note too that if any of the aforementioned fell on hard times there is, in theory at least, a rather privileged familial safety net available that isn’t available to those they say, they represent. Yet, the working classes continue to vote for these people? One must ask why?
Perhaps we should go further back in time and look at the life of Karl Marx’s benefactor, Friedrich Engels. Engel’s life appears replete with contradiction. He was a Prussian communist, an avid fox-hunter, who despised the landed gentry, and a mill owner whose greatest ambition was to lead the revolution of the working class. As a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, he provided, for nearly 40 years, the financial support that kept his collaborator Karl Marx at work on world-changing books such as Das Kapital. Yet at least one biographer has argued that while they were eager enough to take Engels’s money, Marx and his aristocratic wife, Jenny von Westphalen, never really accepted him as their social equal.
Engels engineered to lead a double life, maintaining gentleman’s lodgings in one part of the city of Manchester, while renting a series of rooms in workers’ districts. What is less well known is that the fathers, of communism, both Karl Marx and Engels, also traded on the London Stock Exchange. Marx was a bit of a day trader and Engels managed a large portfolio of mainly blue-chip stocks for many years.
In the spring of 1864, Marx came into some money when an admirer bequeathed £820 to him. This was a considerable sum back then, far more than Marx earned from his writing. No time was wasted on spending the money – the family home was renovated, pets bought for the kids and vacations taken. Sounds like your typical communist.
However, not all of his funds were directed toward consumption. As Marx writes in a letter to his uncle Lion Philips in the summer of 1864:
“I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating … in English stocks, which are springing up like mushrooms this year … and are forced up to quite an unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse. In this way, I have made over £400. …
One biographer claims Marx decided to try his hand at financial speculation after hearing of the killing that German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle was making on the stock market. Another biographer suggests that some encouragement was provided by Engels (who was part owner of a cotton mill and knowledgeable about business matters).
Further on in his letter to his uncle, Marx says that he is going to do some more trading:
“… now that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again. It’s a type of operation that makes demands on one’s time, [but] it’s worthwhile running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money.”
And what of Engels? He had some investing savvy thanks to his business background, which included a seat on a stock exchange. According to British historian Tristram Hunt in The Frock-Coated Communist, when Engels retired in 1870 at the age of 49, the Prussian’s portfolio was worth, in today’s money, about £1.2-million ($2-million), almost as much as Mary Lou McDonald (who has a fortune of just under 2 million euros according to the Irish Independent). When Engels died 25 years later, it was worth the equivalent of £2.2-million. Holdings included shares in the London and Northern Railway Co., South Metropolitan Gas Co., Channel Tunnel Corp. and Foreign and Colonial Government Trust Co.
During retirement, Engel’s portfolio produced an income sufficient to cover his living costs, as well as provide Marx with an annual subsidy of £380. This effectively gave both men membership in the rentier class, (persons living off the rent, property and investments), a reviled class according to many communists (except the founders of communism).
Engels had a rationale for why it was okay to be a rentier. It went like this: Trading stocks “simply adjusts the distribution of the surplus value.” It doesn’t expropriate it from the workers. How many times have we heard a champagne socialist like Bernie Sanders excuse away his own wealth?
Both Engels and Marx closely monitored the business landscape. A correspondence between the two in 1852 illustrates this, stating:
“The minor panic in the money market appears to be over, consols [a type of government bond] and railway shares are again rising merrily, money is easier. … I don’t believe that the crisis will this time be preceded by a rage for speculation … crucial ill-tidings from overstocked markets must surely come soon. Massive shipments continue to leave for China and India … Calcutta is decidedly overstocked … I don’t believe prosperity will continue beyond October.…”
Engels once declared: “I am not so simple as to look to the socialist press for advice on these operations. Anyone who does so will burn [their] fingers and serve [them] right!” Instead, both men were devoted readers of the Economist magazine and other serious business publications.
Doyen of the far left, Noam Chomsky, has been exposed as another “do as I say, not as I do” socialist (or anarcho-syndicalism to be more precise). Chomsky has frequently berated the “massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich” and criticized the concentration of wealth in “trusts” by the wealthiest 1 percent. The American tax code, he has argued, is rigged with “complicated devices for ensuring that the poor—like 80 percent of the population—pay off the rich.”
Yet, Chomsky, with a net worth north of $2,000,000, decided to create one for himself. A few years ago, the aged anarcho-syndicalist went to Boston’s venerable, and exclusive, law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in “income-tax planning,” established an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from the reaches of Uncle Sam. He nominated his tax attorney and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions, copyrights he feverishly protects.
Chomsky also favours the estate tax and massive income redistribution—just not the redistribution of his income.
When questioned, Chomsky replied to the obvious hypocrisy this way stating that the tax shelter is okay because he and his family are “trying to help suffering people.”. That makes it all fine so.
How many times, do we read the far left excusing their own privileges? Even the Marxist inspired Black Lives Matter founder, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, couldn’t help taking a huge slice of capitalist pie, the same pie she detested when eaten by others, she now gobbled down with a property buying binge.
Chomsky charges $12,000 a pop, for giving speeches on college campuses around the country at often dozens of times a year. Arch self-promoting “socialist” Barack Obama charges $400,000 a speech, yes, you read that correctly.
The likes of Bono, Geldof, and other notorious extremely wealthy “socialists” are a dime a dozen, so why do the working classes still allow themselves to be duped by these hypocrites?
For far too long the working classes have been made to suffer by the very people they hand power to, and so a large amount of blame must be pointed inwards. The working classes are seduced by policies that seem, on their face, to ameliorate their lot, but in truth it makes them into dependent slaves of a State and a very middle-class heavy NGO sector.
The communists and socialists (socialism being communism in slow motion), pretend to breakdown the hierarchical system, but instead construct their own. In Soviet Russia, for example, the ‘Nomenklatura’, or elite party members, created a system whereby influential posts in government and industry were filled by Party appointees, and the privileges those positions attracted were plenty. They had access to the best care and food.
When Socialist Hugo Chavez of Venezuela died, he had amassed a personal fortune of one billion dollars. He bequeathed his fellow Venezuelans utter poverty. Fidel Castro, like many of the Irish left, went to private school. Like many in the Irish left he had expensive tastes.
His home, ‘Punto Cero’ was far from the “fisherman’s cottage” he liked to tell his fawning acolytes in the West. The luxurious complex in the Jaimanitas neighbourhood (15 miles outside Havana proper) served as Castro’s summer residence near the capital city’s embassy district. According to Castro’s former bodyguard (as reported by In Cuba Today), he also owned residences in Cayo Piedra (a stone throw from the Bay of Pigs), La Caleta del Rosario, which featured a private marina; and La Deseada, a chalet in Pinar del Río—reportedly one of Castro’s favourite duck hunting spots. Castro, like the Nomenklatura, had access to medical centres preserved for the elite in Cuba (not very egalitarian).
The working class of Ireland must take some responsibility for allowing the assault on our nation, an assault that will eventually destroy our faith, culture, and people forever. The communist types seek only to benefit themselves and their cause and will use any useful idiot to achieve it. It might explain why we see radical leftists posing with Palestinian flags, while enabling the destruction of Ireland, or sanctioning extreme radical sex education and other policies that attack the foundations of the nation, the traditional family. The working class need to stop consuming a promised but illusory elixir, that will ultimately poison them to death, especially those sold by someone who sounds like an ice cream man.
