[SolarCross]

Let's not wander off-topic. The relative merits of Stalin the gentile father of nations is surely an interesting subject but it wants a thread of its own.

[Pants-of-dog]

Pofo's resident conquistador imperialist is also sexist.

I have no idea how you got that out of what I wrote. But then again, you believe in conspiracy theories.

But I am glad that you also want to fight the patriarchy.

[The Immortal Goon]

Let's not wander off-topic. The relative merits of Stalin the gentile father of nations is surely an interesting subject but it wants a thread of its own.

Awesome. Then are you going to comment upon my commentary about her sourcing and the problems with the conspiracy theory of cultural Marxism, or do you prefer to ad hom POD or reengage Decky on a completely other subject?

[SolarCross]

Awesome. Then are you going to comment upon my commentary about her sourcing and the problems with the conspiracy theory of cultural Marxism, or do you prefer to ad hom POD or reengage Decky on a completely other subject?

I wasn't exactly ad-homing POD but giving him the mirror for his own leftist tendency to ad-hom, surely that was obvious? You know any time a leftist wants to shut down a debate they start using certain buzzwords on their opponent like "racist", "sexist" or "homophobe" but there is a very selective technique to it. See this firecracker of a pundit above she is white and she is a woman and the person she was debating in the first video was a black man. So both could claim to the special privilege of being an oppressed person, one for being a woman and the other for being black but also they each could be accused of being an oppressor, one for being white and the other for being a man. So who gets shut down with one of these leftist buzzwords? Whoever is not a leftist.. See if Tomi Lahren was a leftist chewing out a conservative black man then the leftists will shut him down by calling him sexist but no leftist would shutdown Tomi for being white if she were leftist. As it happens Tomi is a patriot and thus an enemy of the left so her special privilege of being an oppressed person as a woman is rescinded and she is called a racist to shut her down instead.

I pay a compliment to a patriotic pundit and POD is appalled and feels the need to insult her by calling her stupid, noisy and useless so then as an off the cuff thing I shut him down leftist style and call him sexist. See? I just thought it would be fun to give a leftist a taste of their own cheap tricks.

If he wants to insult Milo Hujamoflipolis then I could shut POD down by calling him a homophobe.

It only gets tricky if the person you want to shutdown has all the cards in the oppression deck: black, woman, muslim, gay and trans-gender but how often does that happen?

On your commentary. It is worth investigating the cause behind all these exceedingly peculiar people like the SJWs and political correctness. There are too many of them now and they are too influential to be ignored whilst at the same time they are too alien to have come out of US culture without an outside influence. The origins of these pests are neither liberal nor american. Even without conservatives like Sind and this Buchanan chap you reference digging up Gramsci, Lukács as the possible source, there are plenty of red fingerprints over the phenomena, the buzzwords and tactics are eerily similar even as they are adapted to a context where the working class have zero reasons to revolt. You want to say Buchanan is not a credible caretaker for this information, that much may be true but neither are you, no leftist of any description is credible on any subject.

Just look at this characterisation of yours of what is being said:

You have Marxists, both Stalinist and not Stalinist Marxists, saying that Marxism is X, and that they are X. You have liberals saying that Marxism is X and that they are not X, but the Marxists are.

Then you have a crazy conspiracy theory saying that Marxism is actually liberalism, and that Marxists are not aware of this, yet also in control of a global conspiracy to run liberalism as dupes to be Marxists. And, also, the legitimate Marxists aren't aware of this because it's actually the liberals that are controlling the Marxists.

This conspiracy (whatever it is) has been working for a hundred years, internationally, connected through every institution in society, without anybody ever slipping up or mentioning it. Even though Marxism is Y, and Marxists and liberals are both Y, though their roles in Y change drastically even in the same sentence depending on what's needed to keep the conspiracy going, so that rightwingers (as always) get to whine about what special victims they are because this convoluted conspiracy theory that only they understand with no traction that collapses with a glance has an emotional attachment.

It's really unbelievable.

That is just the most blatant and purposeful mischaracterisation of the situation as to all by itself ruin any credibility you have for comment on it. Your opinions can only be recognised as utterly worthless, it is inescapable.

------------------------------------

For those that are interested the blog Zero Hedge has a few additional pieces of the story.

The Birth Of Cultural Marxism: How The "Frankfurt School" Changed America

[Pants-of-dog]

I wasn't exactly ad-homing POD but giving him the mirror for his own leftist tendency to ad-hom, surely that was obvious? You know any time a leftist wants to shut down a debate they start using certain buzzwords on their opponent like "racist", "sexist" or "homophobe" but there is a very selective technique to it. See this firecracker of a pundit above she is white and she is a woman and the person she was debating in the first video was a black man. So both could claim to the special privilege of being an oppressed person, one for being a woman and the other for being black but also they each could be accused of being an oppressor, one for being white and the other for being a man. So who gets shut down with one of these leftist buzzwords? Whoever is not a leftist.. See if Tomi Lahren was a leftist chewing out a conservative black man then the leftists will shut him down by calling him sexist but no leftist would shutdown Tomi for being white if she were leftist. As it happens Tomi is a patriot and thus an enemy of the left so her special privilege of being an oppressed person as a woman is rescinded and she is called a racist to shut her down instead.

You were not "mirroring" this behaviour of which you are accusing me. You were trying to convince me that I was actually a "cultural Marxist" even though I do not believe they exist.

It is incorrect and presumptuous to assume that people are just trying to shut conservatives up when pointing out their bigotry. Sometimes, there is actual bigotry!

But if you are accusing me of this, it kinda is an ad hom.

Also, I never called anyone racist. It was Hindsite who called Kaepernick racist.

I pay a compliment to a patriotic pundit and POD is appalled and feels the need to insult her by calling her stupid, noisy and useless so then as an off the cuff thing I shut him down leftist style and call him sexist. See? I just thought it would be fun to give a leftist a taste of their own cheap tricks.

So you were appallled by my joke? Lol.

If he wants to insult Milo Hujamoflipolis then I could shut POD down by calling him a homophobe.

It only gets tricky if the person you want to shutdown has all the cards in the oppression deck: black, woman, muslim, gay and trans-gender but how often does that happen?

Or you could play the victim card and cry that people are accusing conservatives of being racist and sexist and oh so victimised.

On your commentary. It is worth investigating the cause behind all these exceedingly peculiar people like the SJWs and political correctness. There are too many of them now and they are too influential to be ignored whilst at the same time they are too alien to have come out of US culture without an outside influence. The origins of these pests are neither liberal nor american. Even without conservatives like Sind and this Buchanan chap you reference digging up Gramsci, Lukács as the possible source, there are plenty of red fingerprints over the phenomena, the buzzwords and tactics are eerily similar even as they are adapted to a context where the working class have zero reasons to revolt. You want to say Buchanan is not a credible caretaker for this information, that much may be true but neither are you, no leftist of any description is credible on any subject.

Just look at this characterisation of yours of what is being said:

That is just the most blatant and purposeful mischaracterisation of the situation as to all by itself ruin any credibility you have for comment on it. Your opinions can only be recognised as utterly worthless, it is inescapable.

....and back to conspiracy theory land.

[SolarCross]

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS / CULTURAL MARXISM

Another article on the subject, this time with some links to additional resources.

[Pants-of-dog]

That is simply a dumbed down rehashing of the Lind conspiracy theory. In fact, it even says at the end that it is adapted from his works.

Why is it hard to believe that a Marxist will also want to fight against bigotry?

[The Immortal Goon]

That is just the most blatant and purposeful mischaracterisation of the situation as to all by itself ruin any credibility you have for comment on it. Your opinions can only be recognised as utterly worthless, it is inescapable.

Ugh, if you're going to be so dishonest as to just link the first thing that comes up on google that you imagine proves your point, why are you even here?

Before WWI, Marxist theory held that if war broke out in Europe, the working classes would rise up against the bourgeoisie and create a communist revolution.

Well, as is the case with much of Marxist theory, things didn’t go too well. When war broke out in 1914, instead of starting a revolution, the proletariat put on their uniforms and went off to war.

After the war ended, Marxist theorists were left to ask, “What went wrong?”

Again,

neglects to mention the Russian Revolution, Bela Kun, the Chinese Revolution; the communists in Germany, France, Ireland, Finland, Hungary, Austria...And sort of says, "Since there was no traction with communism during World War I, an international conspiracy of unbelievable complexity and consistency was planned to take place for the next hundred years.

This entire conspiracy theory is predicated on the completely false idea that there was no communist movement in the world around the World Wars. Only a fucking idiot would start with this obviously false premise and then decide to march on how this completely fake reality came to not be.

Here again, a Marxist theory had failed to take hold in the real world. The people were outraged at Lukács’ program, and he fled Hungary when Romania invaded in 1919.

No. There was a little thing called the Russian Revolution. And, actually, about every communist movement in the world was happening at the time. This is a completely made up premise to explain a completely made up world. Even the Americans, the British, the French, the Germans were saying that the communists had not, "failed to take hold in the real world."

This is fictional garbage. Please read anything about the years 1916-1950 in regards to communism. Even your most ardent imperialist Cold Warrior will tell you that this is complete horseshit.

All was quiet on the Marxist front until 1923 when the cultural terrorist turned up for a “Marxist study week” in Frankfurt, Germany. There, Lukács met a young, wealthy Marxist named Felix Weil.

Three years after the Reds beat the Whites in the Russian Civil War, the year the Bavarian Uprising tried to join the Communist World, the year of the Limmerick Soviets, the Chinese in full communist uprising, and Red Berlin established...I guess all was quiet because this article pretends it was?

I already destroyed this absurdly stupid conspiracy theory.

If you want to show how fucking stupid the conspiracy theory is, google literally anything about the communists in the interwar years.

[MB.]

I know I'm coming into this late, but surely we can agree that, whether or not there is a larger conspiracy (I don't think there is), the result for critical theory /post-structural analysis has been,

.... destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism.

[Prosthetic Conscience]

I know I'm coming into this late, but surely we can agree that, whether or not there is a larger conspiracy (I don't think there is), the result for critical theory /post-structural analysis has been,
Solar Cross link wrote:
.... destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism

Are you saying that there has been criticism of those? Or that the criticism has been 'destructive'? I'd agree with the former, though there was plenty of it before critical theory was organised, and there's no evidence that critical theorists are responsible for any increase there has been. But whether any criticism has succeeded in destroying its targets varies enormously. Capitalism has, for instance, thrived since the start of critical theory. There's a lot of patriotism, nationalism and ethnocentrism around. Morality has, overall, increased (less race segregation, for instance, and less misogyny).

[Sampson Simpson]

Right wingers love to say "truth" a lot, but rarely ever provide any. I'm not going to watch the video because its probably the same stupid, non-factual, hateful garbage often spewed by conservatives. Just the fact they say "libtards" is immediately a sign of the lack of any intelligence coming form the person.

They think facts are up to belief. First Fox news had them convinced that only Fox news was fair and balanced, and everything, science, media, universities, everything, was biased against them. This shows the real bias. Now Trump has just taken it to claim fake news, which, ironically is the only news right wingers have been watching or reading for the longest time.

So I find its pointless to hear these stupid rants where they are basically just deflections. And these people have absolutely no foot to stand on, no credibility what so ever. They have showed themselves to be giant hypocrites once again. As if 8 years of Obama didn't show them to be hypocrites, they have doubled down with Trump to the most absurd levels. It's comical they even claim to have any high ground what so ever

[SolarCross]

Right so it is a certain William S. Lind who first identifies the phenomena of political correctness with the work of Marxists associated with the Frankfurt School and with their creation called Critical Theory. I found another piece by him:

PC Marxist Roots Unearthed

Political Correctness is intellectual AIDS. Everything it touches it sickens and eventually kills. On America's college campuses it has diminished freedom of speech, warped curricula, politicized grading and replaced intellectual integrity with vapid sloganeering. In classroom after classroom, professors offer an ideological rant, which students are compelled to regurgitate to get a grade: the vomit returns to the dog. These places--and they are many--are no longer universities, but small, ivy-covered North Koreas.

Just what is Political Correctness? The "Politically Correct" people on your campus really, really don't want you to know the answer to that question. Why? Because Political Correctness is nothing less than Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.

The parallels are obvious. First, both classical, economic Marxism and the Cultural Marxism that is Political Correctness are totalitarian ideologies. Both insist on "truths" that are contrary to human nature and experience. Contrary to economic Marxism, there is no such thing as a "classless society," and economic incentives matter. Contrary to Political Correctness, men and women are different, as are their natural roles in society; races and ethnic groups have specific characteristics; and homosexuality is abnormal. Since the only way people will accept the ideologues' "truths" is if they are forced to, they will be forced--by the full power of the state, if the Marxists of either stripe can control it.

The second parallel is that both classical Marxism and Cultural Marxism have single-factor explanations of history. Classical Marxism argues that all history was determined by ownership of the means of production. The Politically Correct Cultural Marxists say that history is explained by which groups--defined by sex, race and sexual normality or abnormality--have power over which other groups.

The third parallel is that both varieties of Marxism declare certain groups virtuous and other evil a priori, without regard for the actual behavior of individuals. Thus economic Marxism defined workers and peasants as good and the middle class as evil, and Cultural Marxism defines blacks, Hispanics, Feminist women, homosexuals and some other minorities as virtuous and white men as evil. Political Correctness does not recognize the existence of non-Feminist women and defines blacks who reject its ideology as whites.

The fourth parallel is in means: expropriation. Economic Marxists expropriated the property of the middle and upper classes and gave it to the state. Cultural Marxists, on campuses and in government, lay penalties on white men and give privileges to the groups they favor. Affirmative action is an example of this kind of expropriation.

Finally, both types of Marxism employ a method of analysis guaranteed to show the correctness of their ideology in every situation. For classical Marxists, the method is Marxist economics. For Cultural Marxists, the method is linguistic: deconstruction. Deconstruction first removes all meaning from "texts," then inserts new meaning: one way or another, the text illustrates the oppression of women, blacks, homosexuals etc. by white men and Western culture. The intended meaning of the author is irrelevant.

These parallels are not coincidental. They exist because the Cultural Marxism of Political Correctness is in fact derived from classical, economic Marxism, largely through the work of the Frankfurt School. Following World War I, European Marxists faced a difficult question: why did the proletariat throughout Europe not rise in revolution and establish a new, Marxist order, as their ideology said it would? Two prominent Marxist thinkers, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came up with an answer: Western culture. Western culture so blinded the workers to their true, "class" interests that they could not act on them. So before socialism could come to power, Western culture had to be destroyed. Lukacs in 1919 posed the question, "Who will save us from Western civilization?" As Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary that same year, the first thing he did was introduce sex education into Hungarian schools.

In 1923, Lukacs and a group of German Marxist intellectuals founded a "think tank" intended to translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute quickly became known as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, when the National Socialists came to power in Germany, the Frankfurt School moved to New York City.

There, its key figures--Theodor Adano, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich--developed critical theory," a crossing of Mark with Freud that labeled the key components of Western culture "prejudice," i.e., a psychological disease. The "critical theorists" argues that to eliminate "prejudice," Christianity, capitalism and the traditional "patriarchal" family all had to be destroyed.

The connection between the Frankfurt School and the student rebellion of the 1960s was made primarily by a key Frankfurt School member, Herbert Marcuse--the man who in the '60s coined the phrase, "Make love, not war." Marcuse's books "Eros" and "Civilization" argued that the tools with which to destroy Western culture were, in effect, sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. He popularized the Frankfurt School's ideas in ways the '60s student radicals could understand and absorb, and we now know his work Political Correctness.

So that is Political Correctness' dirty little secret: it is Marxism, Marxism translated from economics into culture. We know what economic Marxism did to the old Soviet Union. Are we going to permit Cultural Marxism to do the same thing to the United States?

Lind identifies Marcuse's book "eros and civilisation" as a popularisation of the cultural marxist agenda. This is a book that is still available in the mass market, you can order it from Amazon.

Wiki - Eros and Civilization

[Hindsite]

[quote]Pants-of-dog wrote:
Also, I never called anyone racist. It was Hindsite who called Kaepernick racist.

Now you are lying about me.
It was the beautiful white Aryan women that called Kaepernick out as a possible racist against whites, not me.
However, I can't say that I don't tend to agree with her.

[Pants-of-dog]

Sure.

Now, since you guys claimed that using the word "racist" is just a way to shut down debate, then we can assume that she was doing exactly that.

[The Immortal Goon]

Following World War I, European Marxists faced a difficult question: why did the proletariat throughout Europe not rise in revolution and establish a new, Marxist order, as their ideology said it would? Two prominent Marxist thinkers, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came up with an answer: Western culture. Western culture so blinded the workers to their true, "class" interests that they could not act on them. So before socialism could come to power, Western culture had to be destroyed. Lukacs in 1919 posed the question, "Who will save us from Western civilization?" As Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary that same year, the first thing he did was introduce sex education into Hungarian schools.

[The conspiracy theory] neglects to mention the Russian Revolution, Bela Kun, the Chinese Revolution; the communists in Germany, France, Ireland, Finland, Hungary, Austria...And sort of says, "Since there was no traction with communism during World War I, an international conspiracy of unbelievable complexity and consistency was planned to take place for the next hundred years.

To pretend that there was no movement or victory for Marxists during the Interwar period is completely dishonest. This conspiracy theory only works if actual, verifiable history is completely ignored. The fact that you have no other argument than to just keep repeating that there was no Russian Revolution, Spanish Civil War, Irish Rising, Red Berlin, Bavarian Soviet, French communist movement, W.E.B. Du Bois, or any other movement shows how empty this argument is.

[SolarCross]

To pretend that there was no movement or victory for Marxists during the Interwar period is completely dishonest. This conspiracy theory only works if actual, verifiable history is completely ignored. The fact that you have no other argument than to just keep repeating that there was no Russian Revolution, Spanish Civil War, Irish Rising, Red Berlin, Bavarian Soviet, French communist movement, W.E.B. Du Bois, or any other movement shows how empty this argument i

First off you have quoted verbatim text written by William S. Lind and attributed it to me, for someone who purports to be a professional historian that demonstrates remarkable incompetence at citation.

Secondly Lind is not asserting there was not movement or victory for Marxists during the interwar period only that certain Marxists in their own words were disappointed in the lack of revolutionary activity during the first World War. Let's not forget at the outbreak of World War 1 most of Europe's governments had put rifles in the hands of every single reasonably fit male of an entire generation, an unprecedented level of arming of civilians, which of course included enormous numbers of working class men. There could hardly of been a better opportunity to turn those weapons on the bourgeoisie if the working class had wanted, but they didn't, instead they wore the uniforms, followed orders, suffered, killed and died in droves for their motherland and those that ruled it. I don't doubt for that someone like Gramsci or Lukacs would be disappointed and disappointed enough that these particular marxists would start looking for reasons outside of traditional marxist dogma for why such an opportunity had not been grasped by the proletariat and eventually plot alternative means for inducing revolution. So that right there demonstrates some shortcomings in your reading comprehension in addition to your difficulty with making correct citations.

Thirdly if you are looking to deny that political correctness owes it origins to the scheming of marxists then the place to do it is at the point where political correctness begins and the frankfurt school in the US ends. If you can sever that connection then you can disprove the "theory", talking about the interwar years is irrelevant.

[The Immortal Goon]

First off you have quoted verbatim text written by William S. Lind and attributed it to me, for someone who purports to be a professional historian that demonstrates remarkable incompetence at citation.

I'm not using Chicago citations either! I thought the context was easy enough to follow. You keep spamming other people that claim to support your argument; and I wanted to flag you anyway so you got the update. If it's too complicated, I'll try to simplify it for you.

Secondly Lind is not asserting there was not movement or victory for Marxists during the interwar period only that certain Marxists in their own words were disappointed in the lack of revolutionary activity during the first World War.

Following World War I, European Marxists faced a difficult question: why did the proletariat throughout Europe not rise in revolution and establish a new, Marxist order, as their ideology said it would?

Please cite where Marx said that there would be world socialism after World War I. There were, after all, many wars between Marx and WWI, and some how they don't have the magical distinction Lind is giving by ignoring the basic fact that Europe did rise in revolution. You are portraying these socialists stopping to ask why there isn't a communist revolution when there was a communist uprising or revolution in virtually every country in Europe in some form. Really, the push doesn't end until Hitler rises to power, more or less, well after this conspiracy theory falls apart.

Let's not forget at the outbreak of World War 1 most of Europe's governments had put rifles in the hands of every single reasonably fit male of an entire generation, an unprecedented level of arming of civilians, which of course included enormous numbers of working class men. There could hardly of been a better opportunity to turn those weapons on the bourgeoisie if the working class had wanted, but they didn't, instead they wore the uniforms, followed orders, suffered, killed and died in droves for their motherland and those that ruled it.

So did the American Civil War. Marx covered that American Civil War extensively as a journalist; if this is all it took to mean that there was going to be a Communist Revolution, perhaps you can find his prediction of communist revolution in the United States in the 19th century.

Hint: Marx was also there to observe Napoleon III and the Paris Commune in France.

I don't doubt for that someone like Gramsci or Lukacs would be disappointed and disappointed enough that these particular marxists would start looking for reasons outside of traditional marxist dogma for why such an opportunity had not been grasped by the proletariat and eventually plot alternative means for inducing revolution.

First, like a typical liberal, you're falling back on how you think people's feelings must have been instead of reality. Whether Gramsci or Lukacs felt disappointment is not only irrelevant, it is impossible to verify the feelings and how feelings affect analysis. I know you have such strong precious snowflake feelings, but for everybody outside of your tear-filled eyes, nobody cares.

Second, I already destroyed the girl's quotes supposedly from Gramsci but actually from Pat Buchanan of all people. Perhaps you can actually cite some real evidence since Lind apparently can't, and the girl on the youtube video is apparently easily confused between Pat Buchanan and Gramsci.

So that right there demonstrates some shortcomings in your reading comprehension in addition to your difficulty with making correct citations.

Thirdly if you are looking to deny that political correctness owes it origins to the scheming of marxists then the place to do it is at the point where political correctness begins and the frankfurt school in the US ends. If you can sever that connection then you can disprove the "theory", talking about the interwar years is irrelevant.

[LV-GUCCI-PRADA-FLEX]

If cultural marxism is the destruction of patriarchy, the nation, racial hegemony, and traditional nonsense, sign me up. The problem is that actual Marxists hate capitalists, so arguing that liberals (by definition capitalists) want to bring on Marxism is disingenuous. You're basically just making up your own definitions at that point.

Even the title of this thread misses the point. This woman is likely a liberal herself, using liberal as an insult is the pot calling the kettle black.

[Donna]

If cultural marxism is the destruction of patriarchy, the nation, racial hegemony, and traditional nonsense, sign me up. The problem is that actual Marxists hate capitalists, so arguing that liberals (by definition capitalists) want to bring on Marxism is disingenuous. You're basically just making up your own definitions at that point.

Even the title of this thread misses the point. This woman is likely a liberal herself, using liberal as an insult is the pot calling the kettle black.

Actually, there are probably quite a few members of the haute-bourgeoisie that are Marxists or are sympathetic to Marxism. The Zucc was practically channeling Chairman Mao when he got it into his head that he could bring the internets to Indian slums. No doubt he anticipated that Facebook could revolutionize civil society in the global South. Egalitarianism is the opiate of the younger generation of billionaires.

[The Immortal Goon]

Actually, there are probably quite a few members of the haute-bourgeoisie that are Marxists or are sympathetic to Marxism. The Zucc was practically channeling Chairman Mao when he got it into his head that he could bring the internets to Indian slums. No doubt he anticipated that Facebook could revolutionize civil society in the global South. Egalitarianism is the opiate of the younger generation of billionaires.

With all due respect, I suspect it's more likely that there are members of the haute-bourgeoise that simply came to a lot of the same (correct) conclusions.

The difference is that, at least typically, the bourgeoisie sees this as opportunistic while the Marxist understands this as dialectic—in that the actions taken by the bourgeoisie in order to capitalize on the same basic material truths only ultimately further to hang himself. For instance, here is Engels (himself a factory owner) explaining how the haute-bourgeoisie came to be in favour of minimum wage and minimum work days:

The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed — at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case — to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages. And thus it renders more and more evident the great central fact that the cause of the miserable condition of the working-class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in the capitalistic system itself. [emphasis his]