Consumer Ignorance

If The Communist Manifesto was sold during the McCarthyism era Urban Outfitters would be shut down and whoever owned Urban Outfitters would have been put in jail. And no one from the 1950s would ever have guessed that The Communist Manifesto would be sold in a store which targets young rebellious minds. Urban Outfitters is not trying to threaten “the American way of life”, they are just selling the rebellious image.
It’s ironic that rebellion has become something that can be bought and sold. One would think that a true rebel would not shop in a mainstream store. People are so caught up on what is trendy that most of them probably don’t understand the ideology of communism. Most of them think communism is a great idea and they will wear their Chairman Mao t-shirts, not even thinking about the ideology of Mao. Yes, communism would work if we lived in a prefect world in which everyone was honest, leading to an equal and fair society. But we don’t live in a world where a utopia is a reality.
For example, if someone was put in a situation where their family was starving and they knew that their neighbors were also starving. But there was only had one roll of bread. Do you think they would give the divide the roll with the other family or would they feed it to their own children and not tell the other family that they had the roll?
I’m not trying to be pessimistic, I’m just saying that if Kim Jong-Il is right up there with Hitler and he sees himself as a great communist leader. Everyone can clearly see that people aren’t being treated equal in North Korea nor are they being treated equal in China. With great power comes greed. Both Chairman Mao and Kim Jong-Il became too greedy and no matter how hard they might try to keep things equal among their people there will always be class struggle.
In my political science class in high school my teacher told us that he had $20 to split among 20 students. But it could only be divided up equally if everyone wrote the number 1 on a piece of paper. If someone wrote any number higher than 1 then only the person who wrote another number would get the money. No one could look at what other people were writing. And we all agreed that we would all write the number 1 on your paper so everyone could get a dollar. My teacher had told our class that one person always writes a higher number so they could only receive the money. And just as he predicated one person wrote a number higher than 1. My teacher’s point was that people are just intuitively corrupt.
Marxism is a great ideology and I agree that people need to work as one to gain a powerful society. But I don’t think it will ever happen because there is always that one person who will write a number higher than 1.