Silliest Statement I've Read All Day

From a blog entry by Randall Holcombe, otherwise unknown to me, which I first took to be a howler reprinted as comedy from a student exam:

Marx was a supporter of unions, because unions could give workers some collective power to limit their exploitation. Legislation like the proposed “card check” to extend union representation, and the ceding of substantial shares of GM and Chrysler to the UAW are some examples of Marx’s ideology at work.

Boy, if that is what passes for teaching at Florida State, then we have one more argument for the abolition of public education.

Let's begin. Of course Marx said nice things about unions. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And if the bourgeoisie is going to get itself organized, then the workers had better get organized too.

But the whole point of the bourgeois-proletarian conflict is that it is a point of transition, where the name of the game is dynamism. It depends on--it makes headway among--a proletariat when the proletariat is fluid, alien, ungovernable and ungoverned. Comes the revolution, all this will pass a way.

And this is why Marxism in its golden age had no more implacable enemy than a strong, focused, effective program of democratic trade unionism. Marxism is revolution. Trade unionism is stability and order. The democracies that emerged as bulwarks against Russian Communism in Europe understood that they knew that the way to fight off Communism was to nurture the unions and keep them strong. So did the Soviets, who understood that nothing stood higher in the program of revolution than to isolate the unions and leave them emasculated and paralyzed.

Do unions go sour? Of course. Recall Enoch Powell's dictum that all politics ends in failure. Unions get corrupt, entrenched, elitist, the enemies of a dynamic society. Ironically it is in this phase that unions most evidently lose precisely what made them so attractive to Marx--their energy and creativity as part of a functioning economy. It's a delicate balancing act, this attempt at equipoise between anarchy and reaction. But any way you read it, if you want to get to the socialist nirvana, the unions must be pushed out of the way. So to say that union programs are "some examples of Marx’s ideology at work"--that's a pretty good giveaway of a writer who doesn't understand the first thing of what Marxism was about.

Extra credit question: Marx liked cigars. Cigar smoking is an "example[] of Marx’s ideology at work.