Discuss the advantages of Communism over other political theories like Capitalism.

Communism

In this essay I am going to argue the case for communism as a way to govern a country. I am going to discuss the advantages of Communism over other political theories like Capitalism.

Communism is a concept or system of society in which the community owns the major resources and means of production rather than individuals. This means that everything should be shared between the people. That also suggests that society would not need a government because this society would be without rulers. However, communism also involves the abolition of private property by a revolutionary movement.

Since the Russian Revolution in1917, the centre of global communism has moved away from Western Europe, where it started, towards China and some Third World movements where they have been striving for national independence and social change.

In the early 19th century the idea of a communist society was a response of the poor and dislocated to the beginning of modern capitalism. At that time, communism was the basis for a number of Utopian settlements, most experiments, however, failed eventually. These small private experiments involved voluntary cooperation, with everyone participating in the governing process. Later the term communism was reserved for the philosophy advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto and the movement they helped create in Central Europe.

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in the city of Trier in Prussia now Germany. He was one of seven children of Jewish Parents. Marx attended high school in his hometown in (1830-1835). During high school years he was always politically rebellious and often was drunk and disorderly causing him to spend a lot of time in jail. After high school he went to university in Berlin. In October of 1842, Marx became an editor of the paper Rheinische Zeitung and as the editor wrote editorials on socioeconomic issues such as poverty. However, the Prussian government suspended it because of “pressures from the government of Russia.” So, Marx went to Paris to study “French Communism.” In June of 1843 he was married to Jenny Von Westphalen. Paris was also the place were Marx and Engels joined forces at the end of August in 1844. This time they had more in common. Engels had rejected the Young Hegelians and other “radical bourgeois” acquaintances. Marx had moved rapidly into communism. They had reached a common point. Marx had introduced Engels to the editors of a new radical journal in Paris called Vorwarts which after a vague beginning had become an organ of revolutionary and communist propaganda. But later on, the Prussian government in 1845 closed down the Vorwarts. This forced Marx, along with a small group of others, among them the Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin to move to Brussels

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In their writings Marx and Engels tried to analyze society which they described as capitalistic. They pointed out the differences between ideals and reality in modern society. Rights granted to all had not done away with injustices, constitutional self government had not abolished mismanagement and corruption, science provided mastery over nature but nor over fluctuations of the business cycle and the efficiency of modern production methods had produced slums in midst of abundance. They described all human history as the attempt of men and women to develop and apply their potential for creativity for the purpose of controlling the forces of nature so as to improve the human condition. In this ongoing effort to develop its productive forces, humanity has been remarkably successful; history has been a march of progress. Yet in developing productivity, various social institutions have been created that have introduced exploitation, domination and other evils. Marx argued that every social system of the past, had been a device by which the rich and powerful few could live by the hard work and misery of the powerless many.

Engels and Marx believed that the capitalist system too was flawed and therefore bound to destroy itself. They tried to show that the more productive the system became, the more difficult it would be to make it function. The more goods it produced, the less use it would have for these goods, the more people it trained, and the less it could utilize their talents. Capitalism in short would eventually choke on its own wealth. The collapse of the capitalist economy, it was thought, would turn in a political revolution in which the masses of the poor would rebel against their leaders. The proletarian revolution would do away with private ownership of the means of production. But after a brief period of proletarian dictatorship the economy would produce not what was profitable but what the people needed. Abundance would reign and inequalities and coercive government would disappear.

Marx and Engels expected that this would happen in most highly industrialized nations of Western Europe, the only part of the world where conditions were ripe for these developments. The basic fallacy of Marxist economics is that it invariably stresses need or demand and depresses output productivity and supply.

From its beginning, Communist rule in the Soviet Union faced a variety of problems. In the early years the government’s very existence was challenged repeatedly by its enemies within the country. When the Communist party emerged victorious it was faced with the need to rebuild the nation’s ruined economy and to train the Russian people for life in the 20th century. Later, all efforts were concentrated on the task of transforming a backward country into a leading industrial nation and a first rate military power. The task was ambitious, the obstacles were formidable and there was no time to waste particularly after the disastrous interruption of World War II. The Soviet leadership therefore was ruthless in marshalling all available human and material resources for the job of modernization. The resulting system of total control has been labelled totalitarianism, but others have called it Stalinism, after Joseph Stalin the leader who shaped and controlled the government of the USSR for more than a quarter of a century after Lenin’s death. Stalinism of course in no way resembled the Communist Utopia that Marx and Engels had envisioned.

Three decades after Stalin’s death the USSR was still ruled by an autocrat. It was a society administered by a managerial bureaucracy who in many ways was no less conservative and no closer to the people than bureaucracy tends to be everywhere. The country’s cultural and intellectual life remained substantially under the control of the ruling party.

Party ideology meanwhile, stressed that socialism had been attained and communism was near. The relationship of this first Communist State with the rest of the world was consistently troubled. To the West, a Communist government always appeared as a threat and from the very beginning there were attempts to destroy it by force of arms. These attempts may have reinforced the efforts of the Communist government to save itself by promoting revolution everywhere. Yet in its isolated and endangered position, the Communist regime also needed to establish workable relations or alliances with other countries. Between 1945 and 1975 the number of countries under Communist rule increased greatly, partly because revolutionary Communist movements gained strength in various parts of the Third World.

In this manner the former isolation of the Soviet Union had been lifted, but the hostility between the Communist and the non-Communist world had to some extent, been complicated by deep animosity within world communism. Rapid political changes in Eastern Europe, the USSR and elsewhere between 1989 and 1991 dramatically reduced the number of Communist regimes.

The main alternative in modern day, to communism, is democracy. In order for true Democracy to take place all people must be subject to the same laws and be allowed to freely express their ideas. One major problem with this is that there tend to be class systems in Democracies which create social differences and inequalities.

Class is determined by income and education, and differing levels of these two factors can help explain why class bias occurs. For example, because educated people tend to understand politics more, they are more likely to vote. In fact, political studies done at Princeton in 1995 clearly showed that 76 percent of all voters had college degrees. The same studies have been done in the next three years and showed the percentage steadily holding at 76 percent, except in 1997, when it dropped down by two percent. This four to one ration of college educated voters versus non-college educated voters shows a clear inequality and bias in the American voting system.

As you can see countries that call themselves a “democracy” are often pseudo-democracies as there is an overall lack of equality. There is only one true way to rule a nation and that is Communism! This way of ruling a country is the only one where the population is truly free, where the working man earns as much as the boss. Communism has failed in the past, but only because of one man choosing the path of dictatorship. Without this hindrance, Communism should be able to work successfully, as long as the people involved truly believe this is the correct society for them and are willing to work at it.

In a so called “democracy” it is said that the leader is chosen from a selection of candidates by the people but, who chooses these candidates? And what makes them suitable to govern the country? Just because they have perhaps studied politics in collage does not mean they have the quality’s to lead a nation. This is why in communism the leader is not so much a leader per say but more of an “administrator”

Gareth Hopkins 11 M2 Page