Evil Empire Speech: The Communist Manifesto
Evil Empire Speech: The Communist Manifesto
Have you ever had one of those days where everything goes wrong, like Hey-universe-what-did-I-ever-do-to-you bad? Then you get to work and your boss takes the last donut and you glare while contemplating mutiny?
Good news for you, comrade—Karl Marx wrote a how-to guide just for you.
When he wrote the Communist Manifesto, Marx was rather horrified by the working conditions regular people were dealing with in Russia, especially because those people weren't suddenly living better lives with lots of expensive things. Plus, the rich folks had control over the royals, so under the capitalist system, your boss could take as many donuts as he wanted and you could do nothing about it.
The Manifesto suggested the working class revolt as a group, a community, because the rich really couldn't do anything about it. Then, after the Average Joes were in power, they could help the country transition into communism, where everyone was equal and no one group would make money by severely underpaying another group.
In theory, the Manifesto was about everyone sharing the means of production. It wasn't intended to create an oppressive government, but the working class didn't really know what to do with the equality once they achieved it under Lenin in 1917. And, once ol' Vlad was in charge, he made lots of changes that created more problems.
In his speech, Reagan said that Lenin, using Marx's work as inspiration, believed morality was "entirely subordinate" to his cause (114). If it doesn't contribute to communism changing the world, Lenin has no time for it—and morals usually have little to do with "world revolution" (112). The problem with that is communist leaders weren't held accountable for their actions, which led to the social inequalities and injustices that Reagan talked about fixing in his Evil Empire speech.