By I.M. Ulysses
I want to thank writer Dennis Raphael for his thoughtful and incisive article "Social murder and the Doug Ford government" (Toronto Star October 8, 2018). Were it not for him, I would not have realized that, despite much social progress since the time of Karl Marx and his partner, Friedrich Engels in the 19th Century, that Premier Doug Ford (and, presumably, all his supporters) were guilty of 'Social Murder' in the 21st!
Indeed, it was quite 'enlightening' to realize that in our modern age, with a multitude of social programs, including Employment Insurance, Workers’ Pensions, Welfare, Medicare and a raft of other taxpayer funded policies, we are still living in a society that deliberately oppresses the working class that do most of the living, dying, and working.
That our Premier could have done so in the short 100 days since he took office, without even having passed his 'austerity' budget and put forward the "massive imposition of cutbacks to services," is even more amazing and quite troubling.
Indeed it hearkens back, does it not, to the famed Marie Antoinette and her "let them eat cake" quote, urging the masses to enjoy the few crumbs our betters will kindly provide us as we struggle in the drudgery and aimlessness that, apparently, is our lot in sewer that Ontario has flung itself into since June 7th 2018.
Truly we now live in a dark age where the lumpen proletariat, like myself and my co-workers, are fully oppressed and in need of the liberating policies put forward by Marx and Engels in their Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. Indeed it is quite conceivable that, before long, the Premier (who is truly the new manifestation of Hitler and Trump, but with better hair and no mustache) will likely reduce workplace protections like the 40-hour work week, outlaw unions, paid vacations, government holidays and he may even cancel Christmas too. Before long he will set up work camps and force us all to wear cheap suits as we labour in endless toil providing services and resources to the upper classes that oppress us, unless we, the uneducated masses, take power away from him and his elitist friends!
Truly it is now long past the time to strike a blow! It's time, indeed, to raise high the Red Banner of Socialism and march in the streets!
Let us give up our cell phones, our cars, our televisions, our computers (in fact, every luxury we enjoy as 'victims' of Capitalism), and our fake freedom and burn down Queen's Park! Let us riot in the streets and demand peace, bread and land from these morbid oppressors of liberty and throw them into the dungeons of doom that now looms before us in this new and horrible era that is dawning upon us!
Down with Capitalism! Down with democracy! Let's set up our soviets of workers and peasants and before long we, too, can enjoy the 'benefits' of Workers Paradises like Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union, among other progressive societies that 'take care' of people!
Never mind gulags, state terror, daily indoctrination, fake facts and secret police. These are clearly nothing but temporary hiccups on the path to true Socialism that the countries of the former East Bloc once fully "enjoyed." But these regimes have since betrayed the historical dialectic that Marx so eminently put forward and are now on their path to ruin and tyranny that we now have here in the Social Murder capital of the world, as Ontario is known today!
So thank you, Professor Raphael (and the "progressive" Toronto Star) for your wonderful, intelligent, and forward-thinking column! Your 'wisdom' is timeless and on behalf of all the oppressed masses suffering under the vile Ford Regime, thank you for showing us, as Marx did some 160 years ago, that we "have nothing to lose but our chains."
