You're getting closer to the goal, here. Communism isn't about giving power to one person or even a small group of people. Communism is about distribution of power. The ideals Marx is trying to share here involve sharing basically everything, including power. Contrast that with the "communist" regimes that we've seen rise and fall, who did no sharing of power.

Basically, the hippie communes of the free love era were closer to Marxist ideals than the "communist" governments in Russia, China, et al.

Power transfer actually becomes a lot easier when there is no one person with authoritative power.

I was a TW customer for some time and then moved to a place where my only cable choice is Comcast. I can tell you from experience that TW was a vastly better product. Comcast is getting better, but I still got a better product for less money (and free service calls on top of it) through TW than what I get from Comcast.

TW customers should be breathing a sigh of relief that the merger didn't go through; Comcast customers are disappointed that they missed out on a possible chance at a better product.

That said, there is still almost nothing on TV worth watching. This is becoming increasingly a fault of the cable companies as they go about buying up networks so that they can provide various degrees of exclusive content.

Indeed, he saw the class struggle as being the primary force of oppression in his day - and indeed to him throughout history.

And the overwhelming majority of people in this world die in the same socioeconomic class that they were born in to. His experiment is to place all people in a single class and study the effects it has on their ability to prosper and achieve their potential.

Marx's argument in the end will be for the working class to rise up and take control. He believed that this would be the path to a single class society, when the means of production are controlled by the people who themselves toil on said production.

Wikipedia certainly agrees with the idea of Marx's ideas being influenced by Rousseau.

You're getting really close to the problem that Marx's ideals faced when applied in real societies. It is accepted in many circles that Marx never had in mind large (both in terms of geography and population) nations when he wrote the Manifesto. The countries he had his eye on most for this were Germany, France, and the UK. While they are, of course, three of the largest economies of Europe, they also are less of a management challenge than Russia or China.

It is unclear if Marx thought that Communism could scale for larger countries, and he was not alive to see the revolution in Russia.

Compare what has actually been done to what Marx aspired to do.

OK, thank you for the clarification. I wasn't sure based on what you wrote if you stopped where you thought the idea of the statement ended, or if you stopped there just to highlight that sentence without doing a longer quote.

In the case of the Communist Manifesto, a single sentence is usually a single thought. Sometimes a single thought is spread over multiple sentences in this document but I don't think I've seen him ever write a sentence where he incorporated multiple thoughts - or at least, not thoughts that hadn't been introduced earlier in the same chapter. In this vein is it acceptable for me to then assume that if you raise a question by quoting a part of a sentence that you want to discuss the entire sentence (at least, unless explicitly stated otherwise)? I just want to make sure I understand what questions you are raising and how, here.

I would argue from my experience that the only one from that list who is not manipulated at the whim of the market is the priest. I have not seen the market as a tool that benefits anyone from the lower economic echelons.

I wouldn't say he's trying to make them into "villains", he is trying rather to show what happens when one class of people has unchecked dominance over another and the dominated class has close to no opportunity to change it on their own. This may, again, be human nature - but that is what made the idea of communism so revolutionary as it hadn't been done before (and arguably still hasn't been done).

I would say that Marx saw the accumulation of bourgeoisie power as a direct result of the brutal class warfare of the middle ages. Remember the Marxist ideal - which arguably has never been pursued anywhere for very long - is to have a classless society. This is what made the Manifesto so revolutionary, he wanted to propose a very different way of going about doing things for society.

Now, whether or not it is absolute human nature to divide people up into classes is a discussion that should still be had. Regardless Marx wanted to have a run at not having that division.

It means plenty. It just might not have the meaning that you were trying to extract.

My browser is using a different dictionary than you. The point should not have been that hard to understand. But go ahead, jump to completely disconnected conclusions instead and make yourself look like an imbecile, I won't stop you.

Firefox 33.0 claims otherwise.

Rather arrogant of you to assume that you would have better knowledge of these tools than I, particularly when you began your rant not knowing what tools I am using.

Did you have an argument, or are you just crank-writing to me? My lunch is more interesting so far.

I thought regular powerpoint was brutal. What happens when weaponized powerpoint crashes (and is that good or bad)?

Very true. He did, however, qualify for a gun permit in ... oh, wait it's Nevada. In some other places gun owners generally have common sense. It's a good thing people in states like Texas are so much more ... what's the word, the opposite of responsible?

Even I know that the first commandment of gun safety is

It really boggles me that people will proceed to clean a gun without first checking whether or not there is ammunition in it. Any time anyone hands me a gun for any purpose - regardless of who they are, where they are, how I know them, etc - I first check the chamber and any ammunition clips to see that I know whether or not I have just been handed a loaded weapon. When I unlock my gun cabinet and remove a gun from it the first thing I check - even though I have the only keys and I always double-check the chambers before placing a gun inside the cabinet - is to ensure I am not handling a loaded weapon.

This is common sense. How the fuck someone can proceed to attempt to clean a gun when there is ammo in it is beyond stupid. The only good news here is that he didn't hurt his fiancée. This type of stupid leads to injuries and deaths of innocent bystanders far too often.

Not long ago the Catholic Church was going to be OK with gay marriage and some limited forms of birth control, until they decided a week later that they still aren't. We ought to let the dust settle more on this one before we start congratulating the church on a sudden outbreak of common sense.

Ordinarily, yes. However it involves money (and more particularly, things that can be advertised on sites such as this in hopes of making money off of them) so someone probably posted it on facebook a while ago and then someone from here thought it was a worthwhile opportunity.

I saw a customer purchase one of these at Microcenter last night.