Ameritopia Does Not Nor Cannot Ever Exist

M2RB:  Freddie Mercury e Montserrat Caballe Barcelona

I had this perfect dream
Un sueno me envolvio
This dream was me and you
Tal vez estas aqui
I want all the world to see
Un instinto me guiaba
A miracle sensation
My guide and inspiration
Now my dream is slowly coming true
The wind is a gentle breeze
El me hablo de ti
The bells are ringing out
El canto vuela
Thery're calling us together
Guiding us forever
Wish my dream would never go away

 

 Not only would Marx and Engels denounce any attempt to label their fantasy a utopia, but in The Communist Manifesto they are extremely critical of what they call Utopian Socialism and Communism. “[A]s the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this phantastic standing apart from the contest, these phantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification.… They therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of their experimental realization of their social Utopias … they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary socialists.…”

 KARL MARX’S COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE

By Mark Levin from Ameritopia

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO 1 was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 on behalf of the Communist League (although the final draft was Marx’s). It set forth the historical and analytical bases for the international communist movement. The first sentence reads, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” But unlike past class struggles, with their gradated class systems, “the modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, … has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.…” Marx and Engels write, “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie [capitalists] and Proletariat [laborers]” (19). 

For Marx and Engels, the market system may have destroyed feudalism, but it “left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous ‘cash payment.’ … It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, unveiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (20, 21).

 What of economic advancement? Marx and Engels argue it is not advancement at all. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere” (21). 

Therefore, the only just course is to eliminate the material wealth of the bourgeoisie. “In this sense the theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom, activity and independence” (36). Yet, in wiping out the bourgeoisie’s property are you not also eliminating that of the laborer? “But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor” (36). 

For Marx and Engels, it is crucial to sever all ties with the past, for the past is nothing more than a history of domination, in one form or another, over the proletariat. “In bourgeois society … the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past” (36).

Unlike bourgeois society, where “living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor, in Communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer” (37). 

Marx and Engels argue that the accumulation of private property is unjust for it is nothing more than the taking of labor from those who earned it. “You’re horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend” (37, 38). 

They also reject completely natural law and right reason as nothing more than the perpetuation of bourgeois control over the proletariat. “The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—the misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property” (39). 

Moreover, the family structure grew out of bourgeois material needs and must be dissolved for the good of the greater community. “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty” (39).

Breaking from the past and family means breaking from tradition, customs, institutions, religion, and therefore requires that communist indoctrination replace education. “But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child become all the more disgusting, as, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor” (39, 40). “What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” (41).

 Marx and Engels could not be clearer. “There are besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience … The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs” (41, 42).

 All history, therefore, is the history of class struggle. “But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages—the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas” (42). 

The proletariat will rise up in a working-class revolution and replace the bourgeois as the ruling class. It will “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible” (42). 

Marx and Engels argue, almost as an aside, that “of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by despotic inroads on the rights of property and the conditions of bourgeois production.” And they acknowledge that at least initially, there will be societal dislocation and misery. “[B]y means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production” (42).

Once the state is under the control of the proletariat, its objectives will generally include the following ten tenets (42, 43):

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes 

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax 

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance 

4. Centralization of the property of all emigrants and rebels 

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly 

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state 

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common play 

8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, but a more equable distribution of the population over the country 

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. 

After all remnants of bourgeois society are eliminated, having been replaced with a classless workers’ paradise, the centralized, all-powerful state shall wither away. “When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeois is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself in a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (43, 44). 

For Marx and Engels, their divination—that is, communism and the workers’ paradise—is preordained. The history of man is a history of class struggle over materialism, where the feudal lords, landowners, and finally capitalists rule over the working class. Communism is the natural and final endpoint resulting from the motion of modern society. It is not an invention, discovery, or reform; its ultimate certainty cannot be obstructed by law or politics. It is the truth (35). Not only would Marx and Engels denounce any attempt to label their fantasy a utopia, but in The Communist Manifesto they are extremely critical of what they call Utopian Socialism and Communism. “[A]s the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this phantastic standing apart from the contest, these phantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification.… They therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of their experimental realization of their social Utopias … they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary socialists.…” (57) As such, only a complete break from the past and a cleansing of modern society can set the stage for the classless state, where there would be no need for politics or government. They insist there can be no compromise with bourgeois history or standards. There can be no remnants of what was and is. 

However, in their denunciation of Utopian Socialism and Communism as “violently oppos[ing] all political action on the part of the working class,” Marx and Engels demonstrate the fanaticism of their utopianism (57, 58). After all, the half measures expose communism as not inevitable but impracticable and impossible. It is one thing to espouse views about man’s historic class and economic struggles and predict the future—the inevitable workers’ revolution leading to an ultimate egalitarian nirvana. It is another to make the fantasy tangible and develop the institutions and mechanics to institute it. As Karl Popper noted, Vladmir “Lenin was quick to realize [that] Marxism was unable to help in matters of practical economics. ‘I do not know of any socialist who has dealt with these problems … there was nothing written about such matters in the Bolshevik textbooks, or in those of the Mensheviks.’… As Lenin admits, ‘there is hardly a word on the economics of socialism to be found in Marx’s work.…’”2

Man’s nature and history are not neatly defined through economic classes, whose members are easily categorized. To say that man exists in essentially one of two conditions—a bourgeois or capitalist/landlord class or a proletariat or working class, with the former perpetually exploiting the latter and the latter perpetually exploited by the former—is simply erroneous. French philosopher Raymond Aron observed half a century ago, “To declare flatly that a worker in a capitalist factory in France or the United States is by definition exploited and that a worker in a Soviet factory is not, is not an example of synthetic thought, it is pure nonsense. It is merely a convenient way of substituting verbal gymnastics for a painstaking investigation of reality.”3 Moreover, as I discussed in Liberty and Tyranny, applying this notion to American society makes obvious its incoherence. “[W]ho populates this [working class]? Is the twenty-five-year-old female paralegal who graduated from college, works at a large law firm, earns $85,000 a year, is unmarried and without children, lives in an apartment in Manhattan, and rarely attends church in the same [working class] as the fifty-seven-year-old male auto mechanic who did not graduate from high school, works at Pep Boys, earns $55,000 a year, lives in a row home in northeast Philadelphia, is married with four children, and attends church every Sunday?”4 

In an absurd attempt to address the obvious fallacy of their post-feudalism, two-class construct, Marx and Engels describe bourgeois and proletariat subclasses, such as the petty bourgeois and weaker capitalists, who may even become wage earners, as well as the lower strata of the so-called middle class, including shopkeepers and tradesmen, etc. They are said to ultimately transition into the proletariat. As the subclasses increase the number of proletarians, bourgeois wealth increases and capital becomes more concentrated in fewer individuals. The proletarians work harder and become poorer. 

Meanwhile, the never-ending capitalist pursuit of new technologies further impoverishes the proletariat. Eventually the middle class disappears, the proletariat rises up, and the bourgeois is vanquished—violently if necessary. Afterward, society is ruled by a dictatorship of the proletariat, which creates the conditions for the classless society. At some point, Marx and Engels predict, the state withers away. What is left is “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (43). 

The likelihood that the ruling proletariat might break into factions and internal power struggles, with would-be masterminds competing for control over the society; or that it might Man’s nature and history are not neatly defined through economic classes, whose members are easily categorized. To say that man exists in essentially one of two conditions—a bourgeois or capitalist/landlord class or a proletariat or working class, with the former perpetually exploiting the latter and the latter perpetually exploited by the former—is simply erroneous. French philosopher Raymond Aron observed half a century ago, “To declare flatly that a worker in a capitalist factory in France or the United States is by definition exploited and that a worker in a Soviet factory is not, is not an example of synthetic thought, it is pure nonsense. It is merely a convenient way of substituting verbal gymnastics for a painstaking investigation of reality.”3 Moreover, as I discussed in Liberty and Tyranny, applying this notion to American society makes obvious its incoherence. “[W]ho populates this [working class]? Is the twenty-five-year-old female paralegal who graduated from college, works at a large law firm, earns $85,000 a year, is unmarried and without children, lives in an apartment in Manhattan, and rarely attends church in the same [working class] as the fifty-seven-year-old male auto mechanic who did not graduate from high school, works at Pep Boys, earns $55,000 a year, lives in a row home in northeast Philadelphia, is married with four children, and attends church every Sunday?”4 In an absurd attempt to address the obvious fallacy of their post-feudalism, two-class construct, Marx and Engels describe bourgeois and proletariat subclasses, such as the petty bourgeois and weaker capitalists, who may even become wage earners, as well as the lower strata of the so-called middle class, including shopkeepers and tradesmen, etc. They are said to ultimately transition into the proletariat. As the subclasses increase the number of proletarians, bourgeois wealth increases and capital becomes more concentrated in fewer individuals. The proletarians work harder and become poorer. 

Meanwhile, the never-ending capitalist pursuit of new technologies further impoverishes the proletariat. Eventually the middle class disappears, the proletariat rises up, and the bourgeois is vanquished—violently if necessary. Afterward, society is ruled by a dictatorship of the proletariat, which creates the conditions for the classless society. At some point, Marx and Engels predict, the state withers away. What is left is “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (43). 

The likelihood that the ruling proletariat might break into factions and internal power struggles, with would-be masterminds competing for control over the society; or that it might spawn additional subclasses; or that once in a position to exercise absolute power a dictator or supreme party would voluntarily surrender their power and wither away, are not even addressed in The Communist Manifesto. To have done so, however, would have required Marx and Engels to once again acknowledge the hopelessness of their utopia. But this is the history and nature of communist governments. In the end, they are totalitarian regimes. What withers away are individual liberties and rights. 

The impact of Marx and Engels on mankind has been enormous and devastating. Notwithstanding one hundred years of communist tyranny and mass genocide, the fanatics cling to their utopia. Any failure is in man and the men who bastardize communism—Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, et al.—not in the dogma. True communism, they argue, has never been faithfully executed. After all, as Marx and Engels preached, the workers’ paradise is inevitable. 

The two-class economic construct, with one class of people perpetually victimizing another class of people, is both crude and defective. The history of man and the nature of individuals are more complex than the simplistic materialist construct of communism and its radical egalitarianism. Yet Marx and Engels invented them and assigned them more value than the individual, ensuring communism’s inhumanity. There is infinite diversity among the individuals within the so-called bourgeois and proletariat—not only economic but religious, social, geographical, political, etc. There are also differences in character traits among individuals—psychological, emotional, intellectual, moral, etc. Moreover, some degree of disunity among individuals within the classes would be natural, as would some degree of harmony and cooperation between individuals in the two classes. In the end, however, when and how are we to know when material equality has been achieved? How is it actually defined and measured and by whom? 

As for Marx and Engels’s condemnation of capitalism, industrialization through capitalism would lead to economic progress that improved the lifestyles of tens of millions in Europe and North America. Advances were made in manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, technology, etc. New products and services improved upon existing ones. New skills were learned as new job opportunities became available. For most, their standard of living improved as they earned more and their material needs and wants became more affordable. In America, automobiles, homes or apartments, running water, flush toilets, electricity, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, stoves, microwaves, air-conditioning, washing machines, dryers, televisions, telephones, etc. are commonplace. More wealth and opportunity have been created by and for more people than under any other economic model. In fact, rather than emancipate themselves from the system, the so-called proletariat helped shape it, benefit from it, contribute to it, and fight wars to defend it. The market system is imperfect, but it is the most perfect of economic systems. 

The proletarians never rose up to overthrow their capitalist systems. Nor did they join together across national boundaries in a global revolution. They clearly rejected Marx’s rallying cry—“Workers of the world, unite!” (64) In fact, in 1989 in Poland, the communist regime was driven from power by popular strikes and protests led by Lech Walesa, leader of the anti-Soviet Solidarity union, among others. Soon Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania would follow. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed, resulting in more countries throwing off communism. A form of autocratic pseudo-capitalism has been adopted in China, lest its people starve as in neighboring North Korea. Marx was also wrong when he predicted that larger and larger industrial enterprises would consume so much available capital that they would crowd out smaller businesses. In America, small businesses are vital to the economy. In 2010, 98.2 percent of businesses had fewer than 100 employees, 89.3 percent had fewer than 20 employees, 78.6 percent had fewer than 10 employees, and 60.8 percent had fewer than 5 employees.5 

Having dealt briefly but adequately with Marx-Engels’s “prophecy,” what of historic materialism—that is, the proposition, generally stated, that history can only or primarily be viewed through the lens of material class struggle? Of course, economics and materialism have played a significant role in the course of history, but so have religion, war, nationalism, law, and politics. In some societies, they have been and are inextricably linked; in others, less so. The demarcations are not always evident or uncomplicated. Missing from The Communist Manifesto’s flawed arguments are the inalienable rights of the individual. Man is dehumanized and his actual identity is lost in the communist utopia. If he is “wealthy,” such as a landowner, business owner, or landlord, he is part of an evil group, whether he is evil or not. If he does not divest himself of his wealth, it will be confiscated from him, by force if necessary. If he is “not wealthy” or a laborer, he is part of a good group, whether he is good or not. Only the latter group survives. The individual’s fate is sealed by a fiction based largely on an economic classification assigned to him by political philosophers and, in the end, a workers’ paradise that is said to be inevitable. 

This approach of predestined pigeonholing of the individual is closer to the utopias in The Republic, Utopia, and Leviathan than may appear on the surface. First, some of the distinctions: The Republic, Utopia, and Leviathan are top-down tyrannies, with wisdom concentrated among a handful of rulers—the omnipotent philosopher-king, the Prince, and the Sovereign, respectively; Marx and Engels describe their communist utopia as a bottom-up economic liberation movement in which “the people” become the rulers as a requisite to the state withering away. The Republic, Utopia, and Leviathan are not only grandiose ideals, but their authors also describe in mind-numbing detail the mechanics of their societies; Marx and Engels avoid the mechanics almost completely and condemn those who try to develop them, concentrating almost exclusively on the supposed historical, material, and political case for their dogma and its inescapability. 

In all four utopias, the individual and his family are subservient to the state. Society, however, would be a far better place if only man would change his nature to accommodate the utopian ideal. Since, left to his own devices, man will not oblige, he must be made to do so. Yet out of this same riffraff, the masterminds are born—both the revolutionaries and the rulers. They rise above “the masses” for, unlike the rest, they are self-evidently altruistic, prudent, virtuous, and wise. Whether or not they know how to run their own lives, they know how to run the lives of others. Of course, the entire enterprise is immoral if not deranged. 

The Communist Manifesto seethes with hate for the so-called bourgeoisie. Their freedom, families, and of course, property, must all be abolished. “This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way and made impossible” (38). “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists” (39). “In this sense the theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property” (36). “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie.…” (42) “[I]n the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production.…” (42) However, the whole of society suffers at the masterminds’ hands, for in its purest form, communism demands a radical egalitarianism best described as an absolute equality of social conditions and an exactness of burdens and benefits. The entire society must be brought down to its lowest level. Individual sovereignty must be wrung from the human character; everyone becomes a slave to the state and there is no escape for anyone, including the vaunted and fabled proletarian. In every instance, communism requires the establishment of a police state, some more violent than others, because this utopia, like the others described earlier, is not only undesirable but impossible—and its pursuit is merciless and relentless. 

Despite this record, communism’s utopian underpinnings and characteristics attract sympathetic attention, including in America and especially among the intelligentsia and malcontented, as it is romanticized as “social justice” and a “liberation” movement. Writing of these sympathizers, Aron observed, “Not only are they sacrificing the best part of the legacy of the Enlightenment—respect for reason, liberalism—but they are sacrificing it in an age when there is no reason for the sacrifice, at least in the West…”6





1.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: SoHo, 2010). Subsequent references to this work are to (Page).

2.  R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, Hegel and Marx (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 83 (emphasis in original).

3.  Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2007), 339.

4.   Mark R. Levin, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto (New York: Threshold Editions, 2009), 65–66. 5. “America Runs on Small Chamber,” Main Street Chamber,

5. “America Runs on Small Chamber,” Main Street Chamber, Sept. 29, 2010, http://www.mainstreetchamber-mn.org/2010/09/29/ameria-runs-on-small-business-2/ (July 16, 2011).

6. The Opium of the Intellectuals, 343.

19.   ibid, p.19

20.  ibid, p. 20

21.  ibid, p. 21

35.  ibid, p. 35

36.  ibid, p. 36

37.  ibid, p. 37

38.  ibid, p. 38

39.  ibid, p. 39

40.  ibid, p.40

41.  ibid, p.41

42.  ibid, p.42

43.  ibid, p.43

44.  ibid, p.44

45.  ibid, p.45

46.  ibid, p.46

47.  ibid, p.47

48.  ibid, p.48

49.  ibid, p.49

50.  ibid, p.50

51.  ibid, p.51

52.  ibid, p.52

53.  ibid, p.53

54.  ibid, p.54

55.  ibid, p.55

56.  ibid, p.56

57.  ibid, p.57

58.  ibid, p.58

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 253). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.