anywhereisbetter

It was one year ago this week that I finally graduated college. That meant never having to open up another book on social theory again. But after a little while, I’ll admit that I started to miss those little guys and their impenetrable texts. So in honor of commencement week, and all those nerds out there that will someday find themselves yearning for just one more heated debate over cultural consumption and class stratification, I offer you a new way to stay in touch with those great social thinkers of centuries past. Behold: Sociology Mad Libs.

Our first selection will be the opening paragraphs of Marx’s 1848 masterpiece, The Communist Manifesto. Enjoy.

The history of all society up to now is the history of NOUN.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in short, NOUN and NOUN stood in continual conflict with one another, VERB an unbroken, now hidden, now open NOUN, a NOUN that finished each time with a revolutionary VERB of society as a whole, or with the common ruin of the ADJECTIVE classes.

In earlier epochs of history, we find ADJECTIVE everywhere a comprehensive NOUN of society into different PLURAL NOUN, a multifarious gradation of social rank. In ancient PROPER NOUN we have patricians, knights, plebeians, PLURAL NOUN; in the middle ages feudal lords, vassals, guildmasters, journeymen, serfs, and again in ADVERB all of these classes further ADJECTIVE gradations.

Modern bourgeois society, which arose PREPOSITION the ruins of feudal society, has not transcended NOUN conflict. PRONOUN has merely PAST TENSE VERB new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of ABSTRACT NOUN in place of the old.

POSSESSIVE PRONOUN epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, is TRANSITIVE VERB by the fact that it has simplified DIRECT OBJECT. Society as a whole is tending to split into two great hostile PLURAL COMMON NOUN, into CARDINAL NUMBER great classes directly CONJUNCTION mutually opposed bourgeoisie and proletariat.

PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE of the COMPOUND ABSTRACT NOUN arose the petty traders of the first towns; from this NOUN PHRASE the first elements of the bourgeoisie PERFECT PAST TENSE VERB.

The ABSTRACT NOUN of America and the voyages round PROPER NOUN provided fresh territory for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese market, the colonisation of America, the NOUN PHRASE, the general increase in the means of exchange and of commodities, PREDETERMINER gave INDIRECT OBJECT, to sea transport, to industry a boost such as never before, hence quick development to the ADJECTIVE element in a PRESENT CONTINUOUS INTRANSITIVE VERB feudal society.

Next up: Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Oh, the fun we’ll have.