•   ////Karl Marx once, replying to Nolan Finley before he was born

   

   

  Behind all the lies and cynicism, the message was clear: people do not have the right to water any more than they do to food, shelter, health care or any other vital necessity. In capitalist America, if you do not pay for something, even something as essential as water, you will have to do without it.
  
  This brutal outlook of the American ruling class was made explicit by Nolan Finley, the right-wing columnist for the Detroit News, whose opinion piece Thursday was headlined: “There is no right to free water.”
  
  Finley has long been a shameless mouthpiece for the corporate and financial interests that dominate Detroit. He has previously called for the destruction of the “entitlement mentality” in the city—that is, the view that workers should expect decent wages, pensions and health care. Two years ago, he declared that “democracy has failed” in Detroit and called for a “short-term dictator” (later arriving in the person of Kevyn Orr) to “create a sustainable operating model.”
  
  Looking for a higher authority to justify the inhumane shutoff policy, Finley turns to the Old Testament in his more recent column, writing, “Ever since Adam and Eve got booted out of Eden, people have devoted most of their energy and labor to meeting the basic needs of food, water, clothing and shelter. It’s the origin of work—you’re hungry, you’re thirsty, you need some decent threads and a roof over your head, you have to get up in the morning and do something constructive.”
  
  With unabashed arrogance and contempt for the population, Finley accuses residents of squandering money on cable television and cell phones. Once the shutoffs began, he asserts, many households paid up their bills, “suggesting that they could have been paying all along.” What existed in Detroit, he declared, “is not a humanitarian crisis” but a “forced reordering of priorities.”
  
  There is little doubt many residents stopped paying for food, medicine and other daily necessities to get their water turned back on. Thousands of others, however, continue to live without water or are hauling buckets from their neighbor’s homes and fire hydrants or relying on bottled water from volunteers.
  
  According to the corporate and financial elite and their political and media henchmen like Orr and Finley, workers have no social rights. Pensions, health care, public education, access to culture will be available only to those who can afford it. If the capitalists could privatize the air people breathe, it would not be a right either.

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  Charles Brown https://www.marxists.org/.../communist-manifesto/ch01.htm...

  Communist Manifesto (Chapter 1)

  www.marxists.org

  History of the Bourgeois and Proletarian class

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  Tangela Harris Ill read Manifesto this evening!

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  Charles Brown Yes, lets start a reading group on The Manifesto of the Communist Party.

  

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  Charles Brown "Looking for a higher authority to justify the inhumane shutoff policy, Finley turns to the Old Testament in his more recent column, writing, “Ever since Adam and Eve got booted out of Eden, people have devoted most of their energy and labor to meeting the basic needs of food, water, clothing and shelter. It’s the origin of work—you’re hungry, you’re thirsty, you need some decent threads and a roof over your head, you have to get up in the morning and do something constructive." ///////Karl Marx once, replying to Nolan Finley before he was born: "This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. M. Thiers, e.g., had the assurance to repeat it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once so spirituel. But as soon as the question of property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all stages of development. In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and “labour” were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.