At a recent burial ceremony of a senior pastor, unexpected drama erupted. As the director of programs was busy calling out names of people to lay their wreaths on the grave, another funeral procession arrived and got seated next to an open grave about 50 metres away from the site of the funeral that was already in session. For ease of identity I will call the funeral procession that got to the graveyard earlier procession 1 and the other one procession 2.
The list of names of people called to lay their wreaths was really wrong. To beat the prevailing regulation which demands that there should not be more than a certain number of grups of people laying wreaths, the director of programs resorted to splitting the groups into A and B in order to accommodate the many people on the list. He would go like, “the third group will start with 3A, and while these are laying their wreaths, group 3B should be getting ready.”
Naturally, the wreath laying episode took a lot longer than expected. Meanwhile, the second burial ceremony could not be commenced by procession 2 while the first one was still in progress. The second session had come from a nearby ghetto and had their own Pastor. Suddenly they decided they could not wait any longer and started murmuring. The cacophony that resulted from the murmurs did nothing to deter the director of programs from subdividing the into smaller subgroups. As a result, the cacophony escalated to a crescendo, making that section of the graveyard look and sound like an emerging conflict zone.
The way things were, it would not have been a surprise to see projectiles of natural objects launched from the ghetto procession targeting the other (earlier) procession. Some people decided to leave the scene prematurely, before the situation assumed those proportions, by their reasoning. The air was tense as anxiety was clearly engulfing procession 1. What ghetto residents can do in circumstances of nature is usually unpredictable. As the tension was about to reach breaking point, a wise decision was quickly made by one of the hundreds of pastors who were among the members of procession 1. The decision was to allow procession 2 to start the burial process as procession 2 concluded theirs. Within seconds of the decision being communicated to the ghetto group, the tension started to dissipate and peace gradually returned to the scene.
What happened that afternoon was clearly a clash of classes. The two processions represented two classes, one elite, the other less privileged. The less privileged class must have felt they should not have been subjected to what they probably perceived as a monopoly of burial rites by the elites. Their reaction was an attempt to level the playfield. They wanted to send the message that they too mattered.
Living in a society that had sharp divisions among social classes, a nineteenth century German philosopher, Karl Marx, envisaged a violent clash of classes that would lead to the lowest class, which he termed the proletariat, overthrowing the upper class (the bourgeoisie) to create a classless society. In a classless society, everybody would be equal to everybody else and nobody would have a monopoly over property. Marx developed an economic system called Communism, which he articulated further in a book that he coauthored with his protégé, Frederick Engels. The title of the book was “Das Kapital”, which in English means “the Capital”.
Several countries adopted and implemented communism to varying degrees. Among the staunchest of these are Russia, China, Cuba and North Korea. Russia formed a confederation with neighbouring countries and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). From the time of Gorbachev, however, Russia and its associate states became less staunch, a situation that eventually led to the collapse of the Federation. We do not have the USSR any more. Instead, the countries that had been partners in the Federation became independent states. One of such countries is Ukraine.
China too has become a less staunch communist state over the past thirty or so years. Communism does not permit private ownership of business but now Chinese people own and run all manner of businesses. Alibaba online stores, for example, are owned by individual merchants and businesses who use the facility to sell their merchandise.
Creating a classless society indeed sounds attractive but it is one of those ideals that humans may never fully realise. The near confrontation that characterized the story narrated above would probably not happen in a classless society. However, we will probably never succeed in getting rid of classes. Not in our lifetime! Let love reign instead.