Capitalism And Communism: Conflicting Interests

13 Pages 3148 Words

stic experiments, however, eventually failed. Most of these small-scale private experiments involved voluntary cooperation, with everyone participating in the governing process (Daniels). Later the term communism was reserved for the philosophies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto and the movement they helped create in Central Europe. Since 1917 the term has denoted those who regard the Russian Revolution as a model that all Marxists should follow. Beginning with the Russian Revolution, moreover, the center of gravity of global communism has shifted away from Central and Western Europe; from the late 1940s through the 1980s, communist movements were often linked with Third World strivings for national independence and social change. (Pipes)
In their writings, Marx and Engels tried to analyze contemporary society, which they described as capitalistic. They pointed out the discrepancies 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 had provided mastery over nature but not over the flow of the business cycle; and the efficiency of modern production methods had produced slums even with the presence of such a lavish lifestyle. (Marx)
Every social system of the past, Marx argued, had been a device by which the rich and powerful few could live by the toil and misery of the powerless many. Each system, therefore, was racked by conflict. Moreover, each method of exploitation had flaws that sooner or later destroyed it, either by slow disintegration or by revolution. 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 accumulated, the less use it would have for these goods; the more peopl...