A spectre is
haunting the world -- the spectre of communism. God and mortal,
freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, in a word, oppressor
and oppressed, always stood in constant opposition to one
another, carried on an uninterrupted, sometimes hidden, sometimes
open fight. A fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the
common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of
history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of
society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank.
Karl Marx developed revolutionary communism almost 150 years ago
and with the assistance of his close comrade-in-arms Friedrich
Engels, he developed a comprehensive philosophical system,
dialectical materialism, discovering the basic laws, which shape
human history.
Their idea: that
the history of all existing society is the history of a struggle
against oppression.
But where their
thoughts entirely original?
Many centuries
before Marx and Engels; in a time of myths and legends, when the
Gods where petty and cruel and plagued mankind with suffering,
one man dared to challenge the system already. Hercules, the Son
of Zeus and his friend Iolaus travelled the Earth, battling the
Gods and fighting for justice wherever an innocent would suffer.
Their thoughts and ideas helped to develop a science of political
economy that revealed the exploitation of the mortals
(proletariat), and the inherent anarchy and contradictions of the
capitalist mode of the Olympian Gods.
Hercules developed
his revolutionary theory in close connection with and to serve
the human struggle of the people in the known world. Together
with Iolaus of Thebes, he fought for the rights of the people,
and their attempts to abolish the influence of Gods like Hera and
Ares on the mortals, was in fact the first great attempt of the
proletariat to seize power from the bourgeoisie.
Through the tales
of his Seven Labours and many other deeds, Hercules armed the
world proletariat with an understanding of its historic mission:
To seize political power through revolution and unity and to use
this power to transform social conditions until the very basis
for the cleavage of society into different classes is eliminated.
Iolaus himself, during his time as King of Attica, introduced the
idea of abolition of power of the few and initiated a system of
equal representation for everybody.
Hercules also led
the struggle against the opportunists in the proletarian
movement, such as Medeas Maximus, who sought to confine the
struggle of the mortals to improving the conditions of
wage-slavery without challenging the existence of this slavery
itself.
Together, the
stand, viewpoint and method of Hercules and Iolaus could have
formed the basis of Marx's and Engel's theories, and
represents the first great milestone in the development of the
ideology of the proletariat.
With his motto
"Killing never solved anything", Hercules even went a
step further to show that the world was divided between the great
majority, the oppressed nations and the peoples, and showed that
the imperialist powers are forced to go to war periodically to
re-divide the world amongst themselves. Hercules waged a
life-and-death struggle against the Gods and the tales of his
deed united the struggles of the oppressed peoples.
After Iolaus'
unexpected death in Sumeria, Hercules defended the proletarian
dictatorship in Eire and Norse against enemies from within their
divinity as well as from imperialist forces of the Roman
invasion, lead by Julius Caesar. The son of Zeus carried forward
the cause of socialist construction and transformation of the
known world. Hercules might not have known it, but he fought in
fact for an international communist movement and hundreds of
millions of proletarians and oppressed masses of the world were
increasingly propelled into struggle against the world
imperialist system.
Hercules'
ideas consisted of thousands of truths, but in the final analysis
they all boil down to one: one has to fight for what one believes
in and together, we can make a difference!
The Devil's Advocate
By: Ceridwen