Final Word from Thursday, January 26, 2012
Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and other revolutionary socialists gathered in 1915 for theZimmerwald Conference in Switzerland and called for an end to WWI. The Manifestothey signed stated that the war was the "outcome of the attempt on the part ofthe capitalist classes of each nation to foster their greed for profit by the exploitationof human labor and of the natural treasures of the entire globe." Many of those protestingthis year's World Economic Forum could sign a similar manifesto, and in severalkey ways they would be right, but the delegates snuggled inside the bungalowsare only looking to tweak the broken global system enough to keep it going a bit longer.It's ironic that the biggest capitalists of today are the most guilty of the kind ofrigid, demagogic thinking that we often associate with the Bolsheviks. Unless theychange their way of thought soon, some of them might go the way of the czar.
Glossary of difficult words
to foster - to encourage or promote the development of;
to snuggle - to settle or move into a warm, comfortable position;
to tweak - to improve a mechanism or system by making fine adjustments to it;
to go the way of - to experience the same fate as.