Montanan Democrats Nominate Utopia

Amanda Curtis, the Democratic nominee to replace Max Baucus John Walsh, the plagiarist, at the memorial of fellow Wobblie, Frank Little, whose epitaph reads: ‘Slain by the capitalist interest for organizing and inspiring his fellow men.’

After Senator John Walsh withdrew his candidacy following revelations of egregious plagiarism, the Democratic Party of Montana was left to wring its collective hands and say 'What to do? What to do?'

Because they are the Party of Genius, they chose a real winnah, baby!  According to American Commitment, the Democrats replaced the Plagiarist with a Revolutionary Socialist, 'State Rep. Amanda Curtis, a member of the radical, revolutionary socialist group Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).'

Rep. Curtis was nominated for the United Stated Senate by the Montana Democratic Party on August 16, 2014.  Less than two weeks earlier, on August 4, she tagged herself in this photograph featuring IWW banners and identifying Curtis as an FW, or “Fellow Worker,” the term used in IWW for group members:

Her husband Kevin Curtis is the Butte delegate to the IWW’s statewide group, known as Two Rivers General Membership Branch.  The telephone number listed for Mr. Curtis in his role with IWW is the same number Rep. Curtis lists as her primary contact for legislative constituents. 

The mission statement for the Two Rivers General Membership Branch of IWW (of which Kevin Curtis is a leader and Amanda Curtis is a member) is: 

The Two Rivers General Membership Branch consists of members of the Industrial Workers of the World, a.k.a. Wobblies, from across the state of Montana (Missoula, Hamilton, Butte, and Billings). We are working to organize the people of Montana into the One Big Union to end wage slavery and eventually end the capitalist system. 

That mission statement closely echoes the preamble to the constitution of the parent organization: 

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system." 

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

Per American Commitment, on 7 August 2014, Amanda Curtis posted a photograph of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the one-time head of the Communist Party USA, who was granted a state funeral by the Soviet Union in 1964, as her Facebook pictorial profile.

From Rep Curtis' Facebook page: 

I can't wait for her campaign commercial that goes something along these lines:

'The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. 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, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. 

…

[T]he worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced, it is forced labour… Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. 

…

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions, he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. 

…

Hegel was the first state the relation between freedom and necessity correctly. To him, freedom is the recognition of necessity. “Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood .” Freedom does not consist in an imaginary independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws and in the possibility which is thus given of systematically making them work towards definite ends…Freedom therefore consists in command over ourselves and over external nature, a command founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. 

…

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. 

...

The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.

 …

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! 

…

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.’ 

- Karl Marx

The Democrats probably should have stuck with the Plagiarist.

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