[lbo-talk] Ralph gives up on democracy, embraces enlightened plutocrats

[c b]

wait! refresh my memory. isn't this what marx says will happen? only
ralphie has it backwards. the crises of capitalism will split the
world open and some capitalists will come over to the side of the
workers, putting their money where their mouths are and funding the
revo?

yes? no? i vaguely recall that this was in 18th brumaire. or sumthing?

shag

^^^^^

CB: There's this :

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class
are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or
are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also
supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and
progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the
progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact
within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring
character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself
adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the
future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a
section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion
of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a
portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to
the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a
whole.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007