The Emporer Has No Clothes – Obama’s Marxist Ideology Revealed Again

I’m not one who’s prone to wild hyperbole that anyone not on the right side of the political spectrum is some pinko commie. But when someone is using nakedly Marxist rhetoric, I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school to label that person as a Marxist.

In fact, it’s especially important to do so when it comes from our President.
Over the past two days, a couple of whoppers have emanated from Barack Obama.

The first was on Friday, July 13. By now, most people have seen the remarks, but here they are from the Rush Limbaugh show in case you missed them:

OBAMA: Look, i-i-if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.

FOLLOWERS: That’s right!

OBAMA: You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, “Well, it must be because I was just so smart!”

FOLLOWERS: (laughing)

OBAMA: There are a lot of smart people out there. “It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.” Let me tell you something. There are a whole bunch of hardworkin’ people out there!

FOLLOWERS: (cheers and applause)

OBAMA: If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help!

FOLLOWERS: Yeaaaaaah!

OBAMA: There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.

FOLLOWERS: Yeaaaaaah!

Rush was on a tear the following Monday, saying that Obama doesn’t love America. In fact, I think he’s close, but he doesn’t go far enough. Said Rush, “You know, before Marx there was no such thing as class-driven economics.” Later, he said, “I’ll tell you what. I think it can now be said, without equivocation — without equivocation — that this man hates this country. He is trying — Barack Obama is trying — to dismantle, brick by brick, the American dream.” This gets very close to the truth, but actually it’s not quite clear enough.

Barack Obama is a Marxist, plain and simple. You don’t need to know anything about his background, just listen – REALLY listen – to his words, and try to ignore his cool factor that has his supporters hypnotized. (By the way, if you ARE interested in his background, Obama’s father was a leftist anti-colonialist subversive in Kenya, and his mother was a Marxist. His step father in Indonesia was also a Marxist. By his own account, Obama barely had any time in America to soak up any pro-capitalist, pro-freedom concepts at all. See for instance here, here, here and here.)

In case you are not convinced, we come to Obama’s second whopper – the one on Monday that didn’t get nearly as much play but is equally important (h/t to my friend Kevin):

Obama said today that (Rich people) are “keeping other folks down”

Here’s the full quote: “We’re not making huge amounts of money. God bless folks successful. My mom, my grandparents, the only thing they didn’t like is when they felt like folks at the top were taking advantage of their position and not following the same rules as everybody else and keeping other folks down. And we don’t want an economy in which some are being treated differently than others”

This is part and parcel to Marxist theory. The Communist Manifesto is based on the fundamental precept that there is a bourgeoise and a proletariat – the very definition of class-separated economics. This is the assumption that the haves and the have nots are constantly struggling to out-exploit each other, and that eventually the proletariat will have no choice but to rise up and engage in armed revolt against the fat cats who can’t succeed unless there are more and newer people and markets to hold down while they attain success.

Here’s how S R Larson described it today in The Liberty Bullhorn:

Socialism rests on four cornerstones:

  1. The principle of redistribution. Socialists, and their ideological errand boys among America’s gullible East Coast liberals, always want new redistribution programs. The more, the merrier. The vast majority of government spending here in America, federal as well as at the state level, is designed to redistribute money and in-kind services between private citizens. The philosophical foundation of this principle is, according to socialists, the equality of humans: because all humans are equal, socialists say, they all have the same right to satisfy all of their needs. As a result, socialists claim that government has an obligation (much stronger than a right) to take from those who have more and give to those who have less. Anyone who wants to see what this leads to, this side of the Berlin Wall, need not look farther than Greece.
  2. The labor theory of value. A staple of classical economics – which includes Marxism – is the axiom that economic value is proportionate to the amount of labor that goes into producing it. From this theory they derive a disdain for profits which could be defined as unjust according to the Marxist version of the labor theory of value. This theory is also the base for why many on the left fail to comprehend the use of a financial system – their theoreticians will say that there is no labor base for its value – and their lack of comprehension of the modern monetary system. The labor theory of value is also what the president relies on when he says that “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.”
  3. The falling profit margin. A somewhat eclectic, and often overlooked, component of socialist theory, this one is as purely Marxist as anything can be. It has been given more prominence in modern socialist theory than it had in the early decades of the 20th century. It is used as an analytical vehicle to explain why Capitalism is unstable and unsustainable. Every time there is a recession socialists claim that Capitalism caused it because of the desire among Capitalists to accumulate ever more capital. Everyday socialist rhetoric does not talk about capital accumulation – they call it profits – and so they tie profits to recessions, unemployment and poverty. This motivates socialist attacks on private entrepreneurship as well as big corporations, and drives them to demand punitive taxes on profits and wealth.
  4. Reform vs. revolution. Most of the socialist movement is reformist in the sense that it uses the means of legislative powers to achieve socialism. This is known as “social democracy” and distinguished from revolutionary “communism” by the preferred means of agenda advancement. The two have a common theoretical origin, predating Marx but earning its “scientific methodology” from him. The original socialist movement was entirely revolutionary, but the early versions of parliamentary democracy in Europe encouraged some socialists to split off from the revolutionaries. This “Bernstein faction” has proven a lot more politically resilient than its revolutionary cousin. The primary means of reformist socialism – or, again, social democracy – to expand government is taxation for the purpose of entitlement spending.

These cornerstones are not isolated, but interact and blend to feed the socialist policy agenda. Most daily practitioners of socialism are not aware of them, though the closer you get to the academic core of the modern American socialist movement, the more able people are to elaborate on these cornerstones. This means they are able to make a strong intellectual case for how they want to see America transformed.

It doesn’t take much analysis to take Barack Obama’s words at face value and conclude that he adheres to Marxist ideology. One cannot be a pro-free-market capitalist and assume that any success is built solely on exploitation of a lower class. Indeed, the assumption of the very existence of lower classes is un-American. Our society was built on the ideal of Liberty. That liberty is exactly what created our exceptional American society that has prospered like no other nation in history. One of the most important applications of Liberty is the ability of any individual to use their talents to prosper and rise up out of poverty, or to choose to stay right where they’re at. In fact, the stats bear this out:

At around the 1:30 mark, a statistic is revealed that should forever put to bed the idea that the poor are a permanent class in a capitalistic society. Fully 86% of those below the poverty line in 1979 had moved out of poverty by 1988. EIGHTY SIX PERCENT.

If a better debunking of the baseline assumptions of Marxism is out there, I haven’t seen it. This also torpedoes Obama’s class warfare rhetoric, which should be recognized for what it is. It’s nothing new, it’s nothing unique, and this guy isn’t smarter than the other leftists who have touted liberal talking points. This is nothing more than standard Marxist theory.

And we conservatives should have no problem calling him out on it. Americans deserve better, and we know it.