Today’s word of the day, thanks to www.dictionary.com, is finagle. It’s a verb meaning “to get or achieve (something) by guile, trickery, or manipulation.” According to www.etymonline.com, the verb means “’get dishonestly or deviously,’ 1926, American English, possibly a variant of English dialectal fainaigue ‘to cheat or renege’ (at cards), which is of unknown origin. Liberman says finagle is from figgle, phonetic variant of fiddle ‘fidget about,’ frequentative of fig. Related: Finagled; finagling.”

What does frequentative mean? Frequentative refers to an aspect of a verb, and in this case the aspect is repetitive action. According to the wiki, “Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, denoted by a verb, extends over time.” Other aspects include perfective (outside the flow of time), imperfective (“used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows”), and others. Aspect is easily confused with tense, but they are, technically, different. Also, the frequentative aspect is no longer productive in English; that means that we no longer create new words based upon this aspect.

In the past, English speakers created frequentative verbs by adding either –er or –el to the end of a word. For instance, if a cupcake turns into crumbs, we might say that it crumbles. If something makes a pat sound over and over, we call it a patter. In the same way, the British slang word fainaigue means to shirk or avoid work or to cheat at cards.

According to the On This Day website, today marks the 153^rd anniversary of Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. According to the wiki, it was actually published earlier in Russia, where it might have been subject to censorship except the censors saw it as a scientific study, nothing that would have any practical effect on the Russian empire. How wrong the censors were, eh?

Marx saw everything in terms of class conflict, and he that conflict as necessarily between the proletariat or working class and the bourgeoisie or owners. Marx could not imagine a world in which employers considered the best interests of their employees. And yet the places where his ideas caught hold were not the industrial powers like England and the United States. They caught hold in agrarian societies: Russia, China, Cuba, etc. Why is that? Perhaps because people in industrial nations, in nations that went through the Industrial Revolution early, especially the working class people, found that they were much better off after the IR than their ancestors were before it. The same is true today. The very low wages paid by American manufacturing companies in countries like Mexico, wages that some people complain about, are still far better than the earnings of farmers in those countries.

One of the really curious things about Marxist ideology in the USA in the 21^st century is that it does not reside in the minds and hearts of the proletariat. The primary proponents of Marxism in our country are college professors, lawyers, rich and famous actors, and other members of the elite, the very bourgeoisie that Marx felt were oppressing the proletariat. It makes one wonder why these social elites would favor a system that would, one might think, deprive them of their ill-gotten gains?

Another curious thing about Marxist ideology in the USA in the 21^st century is that we can easily check the results of countries that attempt to impose the ideology on their people. The Soviet Union, which lasted from roughly 1919 to 1989, murdered tens of millions of its citizens and imprisoned many more for speaking out against the regime. Communist China has also murdered millions of its own citizens, and currently has imprisoned roughly a million Uighars, members of a minority group who are Muslim in their faith. The Marxists in Cambodia killed several million of their own citizens. Cuban Marxists, who overthrew their government in the late 1950s, have kept their country at that level for the past 60 years. So why would these intellectuals and celebrities want to impose what is clearly a failed ideology on the rest of the American people.

The argument one often hears from the Left is that “real” socialism has never been tried. But that is just a dodge. Real socialism is exactly what was tried in the Soviet Union; it is what is still being tried in China. In order to make people behave in a socialist system, the government must have the kind of power that the Chinese government has. So the promise of free stuff in a socialist system, the promise of economic equality, the promise of ultimate fairness, would be accompanied by the power to impose that fairness. And when the government has the power to give you things, it also has the power to take those same things, and others, away.

So again, what is the allure of socialism to the intelligentsia? Personally, I think the issue is power, just as Critical Theory would assert. Power in the USA is shared among politicians, businesspeople, celebrities, and even, to a small extent, regular people. The rich and the highly educated, I think, find such a situation intolerable because they know in their heart of hearts that they are better and smarter and more moral and should therefore be in charge of everything.

In other words, all the promises of free stuff are an effort by the elites to finagle their way into possessing the power to make everybody else do what they think the plebeians (that’s the rest of us) ought to be doing.

The image is the cover of an edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital which lays out the tenets of his socialist philosophy. Interestingly, if you want to buy the book from the Barnes and Noble website, where the picture can be found, it will cost you $34.90. My book is a lot less expensive.