communism and socialism-report

7/31/2019 Communism and Socialism-report

1/12

Marx and Engels


2/12

The terms socialism and communism wereonce used interchangeably. Communism,however, came to designate those theoriesand movements that advocated the abolitionof capitalism and all private profit, by meansof violent revolution if necessary.

It was the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels that laid the conceptual foundationfor the communist revolutions and regimes ofthe 20th century.

Marx and Engels dismissed all of the

reformers who had come before them asnaive utopian socialists, claiming that theirplans for communal property could not beachieved in capitalistic societies.


3/12

Marx and Engels urged the workers of theworld to unite to achieve scientificsocialism, or communism. Branching outfrom the theories of German philosopherGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, theytrumpeted communism as an unsentimentaltheory derived from immutable laws of

history, and boasted that communism wasalready a specter haunting all of Europeand was acknowledged by all Europeanpowers to be itself a power.

Engels and Marx were particularly influencedby Hegel's idea that history movesdialectically, but they replaced Hegel'sphilosophical idealism with materialism.


4/12

The dialectical method involves the notion

that movement, or process, or progress, is

the result of the conflict of opposites.


5/12


6/12


7/12

This minority constitutes the ruling class.

The vast majority of people own and control

very little. They mainly own their owncapacity to work. The ruling class uses its

economic power to exploit workers by

appropriating their surplus labor (surplus

value theory). In other words, workers arecompelled to labor not merely to meet their

own needs but also those of the exploiting

ruling class. As a result, workers become

alienated from the fruits of their labor.


8/12

Analyzing 19th-century capitalistic society,

Marx and Engels perceived a class struggle

raging between the bourgeoisie, orcapitalists who controlled the means of

production, and theproletariat, or industrial

workers. In their view, the bourgeoisie

appropriated wealth from the proletariat bypaying low wages and keeping the profits

from sales and technological innovation for

themselves.


9/12

Marx and Engels were confident the conflict

between the bourgeoisie and increasinglyimpoverished proletariat was coming to a

head in the foremost societies of the West.

The inevitable outcome would be a

revolution in which the proletariat, takingadvantage of strikes, elections, and, if

necessary, violence, would displace the

bourgeoisie as the ruling class. A political

revolution was essential, in Marxs view,because the state is the central instrument

of capitalist society.


10/12

Marx and Engels were almost silent about

what would happen after the proletarian

revolution. They made provision for a brieftransitional period during which workers

would form a socialist society with the

means of production owned in common. In

this period, the working-class majority of thepopulation would need to enact a temporary

dictatorship of the proletariat in order to

seize the property of the bourgeois minority

and stifle attempts to sabotage the populargovernment.


11/12

Unlike previous ruling classes, the working

class would not seek to install a new systemof domination and exploitation; its goal

would be a system of cooperation in which

the immense majority, the proletariat, ruled

for the benefit of all. Eventually, societywould evolve into full communism,

characterized by affluence, the abolition of

classes, and an end to the dehumanizing

division of labor found in earlier forms ofsociety.


12/12

The worsening condition of the proletariat,

or workers, in western Europe had not

brought about the class war predicted by

Marx. Many socialist thinkers began to doubtthe necessity of revolution and to revise

other basic tenets of Marxism. They declared

that socialism could best be attained by

reformist, parliamentary, and evolutionary

methods, including the support of the middle

class.

communism and socialism-report

Documents