One of Hegel's most influential disciples was, of course, Marx, who saw an inevitable march of history towards socialism. Replace 'socialism' with 'democracy' and you have the neocons' agenda in a nutshell. Add the fact that the neocon movement was pretty much started by former Trotskyists at the University of Chicago and then you have a pretty complete picture. Of course I doubt that Bush has much of a personal intellectual connection to this movement; more than likely he's just parroting what he's picked up from Wolfowitz, et la.

Interestingly, I think Marx would support Bush and the neocons more so than he would isolationists. Remember, he saw capitalism as an evil but necessary intermediate stage in the transition to communism. In modern terms, this means that a global revolution can only occur when globalization has industrialized the entire world and turned the entire population into equally exploited laborers. By this logic, then, modern-day liberals who try to improve a single nation's infrastructure while preventing outsourcing and exploitative 'free trade' are actually hindering communism rather than helping it, as they're often accused of doing. In other words, things have to get really bad for everyone before they can get good for anyone.

That's just one twisted theory, anyway. I just wonder whether the neocons are perhaps really closet socialists playing an epic game of chess with the world, or if they really think that belligerent corporatocracy is a sustainable form of world governance...

I'd say, rather, that they are overt oligarchists. They don't mind of the 95% of upper to lower middle class proles are leveled to a wage-slave, hand-to-mouth subsistence as production units as long as they get to keep their isolated country club existence. They strive for the benefit of no one but themselves. I believe the Marxist notion of which you speak is based in the Hegelian notion of thesis-antithesis-synthesis--w­hen the class divide has gotten unbearable, the pendulum will swing back violently toward an uprising of the prole class that will level all. but we have seen this fail again and again. orwell has it more correctly in noting that there have always been three classes. Revolutions do note spring from the "underclass," but are fomented from the middle with alliance to the lower, for the purpose thast the middle becomes the new upper class. All this may become irrelevant, to use one of bush's favortie words, with the steady decline of environmental health, the relentless march toward militarism and martial law, and the fact that the nuke-equipped asylum is now firmly in the hands of the maniacs.

"Remember, he saw capitalism as an evil but necessary intermediate stage in the ..."

Wrong.

Marx saw capialism as having evolved from fuedalism...he merely described it.

Any "necessary but intermediate stage" he may have favored would have been socialism, or the dictatorship of the proletariat...which, as he said, was his ONLY new idea.

He claimed that the very existence of the working class would give rise to socialism...and he may or may not be right.

One thing is for certain slap damn sure, industralization/the working class has given rise to an integrated global economy. A Hegelian would claim globalization was the good idea of Ronnie Reagan; anyone else would say it was a product of the accumulated labor and evolution of labor of millions of people.

I do agree, however, that the US left's opposition to globalization is stupid, and its pissing in the wind, anyway. Their working class is gone, gone to China.