“The rich and the crooks are two sides of the same medal, they are the principal category of parasites which capitalism fostered; they are the principal enemies of socialism.” -Vladimir Lenin, 1918 “We risk hitting a tipping point in our society where we have more takers than makers in society, where we will have turned our safety net into a hammock that lulls able bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency.” -Paul Ryan, 2012 “I’m stupid rich, got retarded money/I’m special Ed, I got special bread” -50 Cent, 2008

Today’s conservative has a rather easy time dismissing leftists as naïve “bleeding-hearts” who are presumably too lazy and perhaps effeminate to undertake the rigorous analysis necessary to achieve an understanding of the contemporary world in all of its economic, political, and social complexities. The straw-man “lib’ruls” that right-wing nutjobs love to hate are a cognitively inferior race of beings first and foremost because, like sissies, they evaluate the world in terms of “fairness” and “justice” without acknowledging inconvenient truths such as ballooning government deficits or shrinking profit margins.

But whenever a leftist acknowledges such inconvenient truths and persists in calling attention to the bankruptcy of the capitalist system in the twenty-first century, the right-wing nutjobs get nervously quiet all of a sudden. How can it be that more government spending, not less, is the best plan for the people in both the short and long run if government borrowing at the current levels is unsustainable in both the short and long run?

The scientific socialism of Marx and Engels has always posed a far more serious intellectual threat to the legitimacy of capitalist rule than the utopian moralism of reformers and anarchists. It sets forth a rigorously scientific methodology for understanding the real world in real time that acknowledges and even welcomes the existence of material contradictions in the social organization of production.

Like most people living on the planet, Marxists are indeed morally outraged by the parade of horribles that capitalism has unleashed and continues to unleash upon society. But the methodology of scientific socialism demands that one temporarily set aside one’s personal indignation when studying the social reality of the present time. It demands that one pay close attention to objective contradictions in the global economy, like the fact that more productive factories that produce more widgets in less time using fewer workers may lower businesses’ operating costs but in so doing produce higher unemployment, lower wages, and thus ultimately less demand for those very widgets. To acknowledge contradictions such as these is to give up any illusion that capitalism can be “fixed” or that we should even be trying to “fix” it. It is this dialectical thought process, and not the rigid adherence to any set of dogmatic principles, that makes one a Marxist.

Ayn Rand, the Muhammad of the Mayberry Machiavellians that comprise today’s Republican Party, did not merely declare war on social democracy and collectivism of all types. She also set out to undermine, by way of sheer philosophical argument, the very dialectical thought process that Marx and Engels introduced into the realm of the social sciences. Rand denied the existence of contradictions and claimed that whenever one perceives a contradiction, one must “check one’s premises,” because surely at least one of those premises is wrong. Thus money cannot possibly be simultaneously a store and a measurement of value on the one hand and a means of exchange, circulation, and repayment on the other. Waves are waves and particles are particles, goddamit! Why? Because Ayn Rand said so. Now get a fucking job, slacker.

Which brings us to the premises Mitt Romney assumed to be true when he shared his opinion about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes with what he believed at the time was a private audience of Atlas Shrugged characters. Either Romney himself assumed, or he assumed that his audience assumed, that the same 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax are (a) committed Obama supporters who can never be persuaded to vote otherwise and (b) welfare cheats who produce zero value for society while consuming an ever-growing proportion of society’s resources.

Had Romney or his audience applied dialectical thinking when studying this large chunk of the American electorate, they would have acknowledged the seemingly contradictory state of affairs in which masses of Bubbas and Skeeters numbering in the tens of millions who are part of that 47 percent have been a reliable and absolutely crucial part of the Republican base ever since Richard Nixon’s campaign staff started inventing various innocuous-sounding euphemisms for putting uppity blacks in their place. They may have even pondered the fact that the loyalty of said Bubbas and Skeeters to the Republican Party has always been tenuous because the GOP has not in the past several decades actually benefitted them in any substantial way (other than, ironically, lowering their tax burden!) but has merely validated their (largely valid) resentments against a “liberal” class that threw them under the bus in its drive to appoint slightly more women and minorities to manage its hedge funds and private equity holding companies.

The “47 percent” video will not, by itself, determine the outcome of the election, but it is a prophetic foretelling of things to come. Romney’s statement is symptomatic of the attitude of an entire ruling capitalist class that has long ago given up trying to check its ideological premises. The apologetic politics of American capitalism today is in increasing jeopardy not, as Rand might have claimed, because any one of those premises is false, but in fact because each of them, taken on its own, is empirically true. Yes, there is a class of parasites and moochers in America who accumulate and consume without working, and yes, a good number of these parasites and moochers—perhaps even Romney himself in previous tax years—are part of the 47 percent who pay no federal income taxes. Yes, Obama supporters are more likely than Romney supporters to believe in a stronger role for government in the economy. Yet when the Republican presidential candidate attempted to weave all these separately valid empirical truths together into a coherent narrative that fits into the intellectual straightjacket that characterizes the mass politics of the contemporary GOP, the contradictions stood naked and exposed for all to see.

Getting rid of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, federal college assistance, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other “free stuff” is not exactly a “surgical strike” that will affect only the black welfare queens, union thugs, and dope-smoking Marxist grad students who probably would never vote for Romney anyway while leaving the Bubbas, the Skeeters, the limbless war vets, the old timers with more “traditional” values, and countless other “decent white folks” unscathed. Romney is now on record as saying essentially to America’s poor and working-class white voters: “You are no better than niggers, and I intend to enslave you.” Maybe it’s about time they took the hint.