In the 1800's a Middle-aged Europe became a New Age, powered by industrialization and mass production. The landed gentry, or aristocracy had run the show, for ages and ages. since ancient history. By 19th century industrialism changed all that.
Population patterns were changing. More and more previously-rural folk became urban-dwellers as they moved into the cities to take industrial and mercantile jobs. Those societal shifts shook the very foundations of human enterprise and culture. A previously agrarian farm-labor class morphed into an urban working class.
In about the middle of that 19th-century, Karl Marx and his associate Frederick Engels noticed the changing societal trends. They began making notes, gathering information — what we now call statistics and/or data. And when they analyzed the data they noticed some trends. Eventually, Marx and Engels presented their observations, along with some new theories about some of the societal changes they were identifying in human civilization.
Marx and Engels coined some new terminology to describe what their research had revealed about the progress of civilization.
You may heard some old saying about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Marx and Engels noticed that those people who owned the factories had more wealth, which is to say, more money, assets and property. But most important about what those upper-class owners owned was that they owned the "means of production." They owned and operated the mills and factories. So the theorizing intellectuals,Karl and Fred, came up with an academic name for the people who were running the show:
the bourgeoisie. It's a French word, because they were living and studying in Paris at that time, ~1830's-'40's.
And the name they chose for the workers was proletariat. Noticing the wealth gap between those two classes, they theorized that, in the long run, probabably some of the proletariat would get tired of being on the short end of the stick all they time, and that, after awhile they would rebel. Because, you know, those feisty Americans had changed the historical scenario when they kicked the Brits out of America and decided to write their new set of rules, which they had called the Constitution.
And then, a decade after the Americans had so boldly acted to take their destiny into their own hands, the French had caught wind of that revolutionary spirit and kicked their king and queen off their thrones.
So, as the 19th century rolled along, the winds of change were blowing, very strong. There was a Revolutionary spirit taking hold of Europe, even as it had done in the new world of America.
And then, sure enough, in the second decade of the 20th-century, some Russian dissidents caught the Revolution wind. They amped it up with Marx's revolutionary theory and generated a revolution in which the proletariat did, indeed, take control of the means of production. They murdered the Russian Czar and his family. They forged a new way of doing things in Russia, called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
It rolled along, up there in the far north, apart from the rest of Europe during most of the 20th-century.
Ultimately, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat fizzled.
In the 1980's, the USSR ended when a workers' rebellion in Poland and other Soviet-controlled Euro countries ignited a revolutionary spirit that totally ejected USSR dominion and brought a new wind of capitalistic reform to those formerly communistic countries.
Now, that said, I am presenting to you a fresh theory, about what will happen next.
Observation #1: Many people have noticed: all this industrialization that has transformed our world in the last two hundred years. It has changed the planet itself, and our Earth's ecosystem. The short term for this planetary shifting is "global warming". The euphemistic term is "climate change".
Now. . . all that to say, here is my main point.
In the onslaught of climate change, global warming, and the variable changes — perhaps catastrophic — some observers and activists, such as Marx and Engels were during their time, will theorize, improvise and propose — perhaps insist upon — changes in the way we humans do things on this planet. They will compel the powers-that-be to modify the "means of production", which includes our proliferaion polluting industries and their effluents, what was initially called "pollution" but is now more strategically called "carbon emission".
My feeling about this is that, however it all plays out — the "Greens" and there widespread citizen-supporters will ultimately propose, insist upon, and maybe even demand some authoritative stewardship to monitor and/or limit — the means of production, the carbon-spewing industries which is to say the factories and the generators and the vehicles that cast so much carbon and other pollutants into our atmosphere.
And guess what. They may be right, although they are generally known as "the left." Now this world wide web
enables them to keep the spotlight on a critical global situation.
As for me, I'm just sayin', 'cuz I'm expecting John's Revelation on Patmos to be revealed as the ultimate indicator of how this planet's destiny pans out, a series of world-changing events that will culminate in the return of the One man who died a criminal death and then lived to tell about it.
Glass half-Full
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