In our last Name That Part, we abused it as an opportunity to take some cheap-shots at Microsoft. We thought the hints were a bit too obvious, but as it turns out, we may have a slightly different train of thought than the rest of you. There were some fantastic guesses, and many of you came extremely close; in fact, it was a generic power window motor from the Ford parts bin; the only vehicles still using this particular design are the Ranger and the Crown Victoria, two vehicles that have been reskinned almost as many times as Windows. As such, I’m awarding the win to the legendary POLAЯ, who wasn’t close at all, but who made us laugh the hardest.

On to today’s Name That Part!
As a History major, it’s amazing how many times I’ve had to sigh at network TV when they have made reference to Karl Marx. Forever being referred to as a Russian philosopher, Marx was, in fact, Prussian, born on what is today the border of Germany and Luxembourg. As a young man, he moved to England with his family, where he lived for the rest of his life. He wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, and never even visited Russia in his lifetime. The conditions he was railing against as he wrote his Communist Manifesto were not those of Imperialist Russia, but those of middle- and lower-class post-Industrialism Britain.
Many people over the years have blindly thrown out the belief that Marx was writing in opposition to the Czar. There have even been statements that he must have ended up in Russian gulag, which is where he got the catarrh and bronchitis that eventually killed him.
Ignoring, for a moment, that the gulags didn’t exist until some 50 years after his death, the fact that he’s actually from the extreme West of Germany and not Russia at all, the fact that he didn’t know anything or care at all about the Imperialist society in Russia, or the fact that he was living in England, it is this kind of ignorance that has given Marx a bad name in the West ever since. It is widely believed that his work has been completely discredited; however on a closer inspection, many of the theories and philosophies he put forth live on to this day in some European countries. Sweden and Finland, for instance, have excellent functioning Socialist systems, much like the ones Marx predicted would form, and some of the highest standards of living in the world.
What does all this have to do with today’s Name That Part? Not much, but there’s nothing like the mention of Karl Marx to get everyone all worked up about the commercialism of Christmas.