From the Communist Manifesto:
"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 groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
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 conditions 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."
Marx and Engels use several modes of persuasion in this passage from the Manifesto. They use a tongue-in-cheek tone, making fun of those that say there is such a thing as private property. "Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property!"
They also ask questions. These questions add to the tongue-in-cheek tone, but also force readers to question their own views. Moreover, these questions add to the momentum of the sentence that follows afterward. Marx and Engels use questions twice in this passage to reiterate their points: "Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily."
"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 conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labor for fresh exploitation."
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
This single sentence is direct; it's an advertisement, short and to the point. Even the rhythm is curt and choppy. For sale--stop--baby shoes--pause--never worn. The "never worn" is either an afterthought or the sentences climax.
In its curt directness, this sentence by itself is mysterious and lets a reader guess at its background. Whose baby shoes are these? why are they never worn? Are they never worn because a baby died? Or did the child just skip a shoe size because he grew too fast? Was the family rich with too many shoes for their baby?
The odd twist to this sentence is the last phrase "never worn." Without those two words, the sentence would be a novel shoe advertisement. The "never" adds a kind of brooding tone to the sentence; as does "worn." "Worn" implies life or activity, thus wear and tear. But these baby shoes were NEVER worn.
Your comments made me realize that the story may be a little more contemporary in spirit than I thought. It plays on the reader's assumption that a baby has died, because stories generally build themselves around tragic events. But it could be just a shoemaker's latest product. Or an unneeded gift.
ReplyDeleteInteresting, also, that Marx & Engels ask questions. But in your immediate examples they are rhetorical questions followed by immediate answers. Since their philosophy depends so much on strict distinctions between groups, they spend a lot of the manifesto clarifying who belongs to which group. Their way of thinking - and its language - was a forerunner of our culture's current obsession with group identities.