Tom Lehman
Chris Doss wrote:
> I found this amusing--from The Onion.
>
> LAWRENCE, KS--Chad Briggs, a radical Marxist and University of Kansas
> junior, has capitalist parents, campus sources reported Monday.
>
> "The proletariat will rise up, and the state will wither
> away, " said Briggs, 20, who grew up in the bourgeois
> suburban enclave of Deerfield, IL, before renouncing his
> exploitative capitalist ties during the first semester of his
> sophomore year. "Only when the workers control the
> means of production will a truly classless society emerge."
>
> Briggs said he spent the first 18 years of his life under
> the oppressive thumb of his father, investment banker
> Richard Briggs, and his mother, elementary-school
> teacher Judith Briggs, members of the reigning bourgeois
> elite.
>
> "For years, much like the oppressed St. Petersburg
> factory worker of 1918, I was controlled by the ruling
> class," Briggs said. "The people who owned the house I
> lived in told me when to come to the table for supper,
> when to do my chores, and when to be home on Saturday
> nights. They even controlled the means of transportation,
> giving me the keys to their Ford Taurus when and only
> when they saw fit."
>
> Briggs said his parents still control him, as all capitalist
> running-dogs do the masses, using their payment of his rent and tuition as a
> means of influencing which courses he takes.
>
> "I was talking to my father on the phone the other night, and he
> questioned my enrollment in a film class on the works of Woody Allen,"
> Briggs said. "He said, 'This is what I'm spending $21,000 a year on? For you
> to watch Woody Allen movies?' Even here in college, hundreds of miles from
> my capitalist oppressors, they still hold sway over me. Until the day I am
> loosed from their chains, I shall not truly be free."
>
> Committed to fomenting glorious proletarian revolution, Briggs
> recently quit his 10-hour-a-week coffee-shop job to become co-chair of the
> radical campus socialist group UPRISE (University Program for Revolutionary
> Integration of a Socialist Economy). Like many
> other steps Briggs has taken toward establishing a dictatorship of the
> proletariat, his joining UPRISE was strongly opposed by his parents.
>
> "My parents don't understand that social order based on class division
> sows the seeds of its own destruction," said Briggs, who witnessed class
> division and worker exploitation first-hand
> during a Spring Break trip to Cancun, Mexico. "They just want me to go to
> business school and make lots of money like my sister Debbie."
>
> "Then again,"Briggs said, "why should I care what they think? I don't
> want to end up like them. All they care about is buying this boat or
> starting that retirement fund, or trying to convince me to
> get a Lumina instead of the Jeep I want. It's like Marx wrote in The
> Communist Manifesto, 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the
> history of class struggles.'"
>
> Briggs' girlfriend, Jenny Elsinger, is one of the original founders of
> UPRISE and the person responsible for introducing him to the group. Before
> meeting Elsinger in September 1997, Briggs
> said he knew almost nothing of the woes of workers and their lack of control
> over the means of production and distribution.
>
> "Before the Revolutionary Year 1997, I was pretty much like the rest
> of the campus bourgeoisie," said Briggs, stapling copies of the latest issue
> of the UPRISE newsletter, From Below! "I was preoccupied with fraternity
> rush, football games and getting into B-school. I've
> grown up fast, though, now that I've had a taste of the real world through
> my involvement with UPRISE."
>
> Next Friday, Briggs said, the bourgeois and proletarian classes will
> clash violently, when his parents come to campus for Parents' Weekend.
>
> "There's always fighting when my parents come to visit, and this time
> will be no different," Briggs said. "They'll tell me to clean up my hair.
> They'll tell me to move out of the co-op. They'll tell
> me to stop fooling around with 'this Communist nonsense.' It is as
> inevitable as the victory of the workers' revolution."
>
> "My parents think this is just a 'phase' I'm going through," Briggs
> said. "Well, I'll tell you what's a phase--the ownership's control of the
> proletariat. Now, there's a temporary phase."
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