The fires of our smoldering class war have been re-stoked. President Obama, assorted GOP lawmakers have told us, has initiated the latest pinko uprising by letting it slip that he’ll be pushing for “the Buffett tax.”

Paul Ryan et al. know their Marx backwards and forwards, and they have noted a potentially ominous development: it seems some rich people are going off book. Warren Buffett’s op-ed in the New York Times received a lot of attention. Is this sort of behavior an isolated incident, a temporary moment of deviance, or will Buffet’s defection signal a pattern that sees a greater number of bourgeois pigs side with the proletariat?

If it’s the latter, Ryan knows Uncle Karl believes that the time for revolution might really be at hand: “Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour … a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848)

Does this mean the Obama–Buffett team is leading the charge to the end of history? The GOP knows they aren’t. But they also know that it’s really tough to argue against taxing the quite wealthy when the country is so debt-ridden and in need of a cash-flow injection to keep necessary programs healthy. Especially when the rich know it’s necessary.

So hopefully President Obama will press ahead with this. Hopefully he’ll embrace his place in the vanguard of history. Hopefully he’s read his Marx, just like Mr. Ryan, and sees that now is the time to strike—“the decisive hour” is at hand.

But I doubt we’ll see anything like that, sadly. Somehow I’m guessing he’s going to turn this into more of a “class reconciliation” effort, compromising away anything controversial, than a war effort. He hasn’t seemed to have that inner Lenin-esque steel so far, and unless Obama has had a revolutionary moment one fears that the GOP will have nothing to fear from this latest battle in the class war.