Communism

Communism

Communism has been around for a very long time. The American Indian tribes that were here before the invasion of European culture lived a communistic life style. The first major communist revolution occurred in Russia, in 1917 under Vladimir Lenin, which ultimately failed. Karl Marx, the philosopher credited for the birth of communism, predicted it to be the last social order, that one day, when the conditions were right, the world would live in a utopian communism. In my exposition of Marx and communism, I will present ideas of my own pertaining to Marx prediction of world communism and discuss why I think him to have been right about a lot of his ideas. Despite the many problems Marxism faces he may have been more right then we know.

Karl Marx had many different philosophical theories about the ways of the world. The most interesting to me is his description of the human struggle between social economic classes and how that struggle ultimately changes the system that society operates under. Marx breaks our current capitalist society into two levels, the economic base and the superstructure. The economic base being the mode of production, or the system by which a society supports itself and the superstructure, which is a result of the economic base, that involves every other aspect of society like art, law, politics, and religion; which are the ideological reflections of the social relations of production. From this comes the bourgeois and the proletarians, which are the social classes operating in a capitalist system. The bourgeois are the factory owners or the owners of the means of production and the proletarians are the works who produce the products made with the means of production. It is Marx claim that the proletarians are being exploited and alienated from their own labor or power of production and this creates conflict. I would have to agree with Marx on this. The fact that a person's work has been turned into a commodity and had a value place on it that is based on economic status could only lead to the exploitation of that labor. The conflict between the social classes Marx labels as the material dialectic. This dialectic is what will ultimately be the downfall of capitalism. Once capitalism has run its course, meaning, it has expanded its markets to the entire globe and society has recognized the oppressive nature of capitalism only then can a new order emerge. And that order will be communism according to Marx.

Marx believes that we are products of our environment that the world shapes ideas and not the other way around; that who a man is, is determined by where and when he is. This is a different philosophical view than those of the past, many of which are based on ideal theory. Ideal theory is the concept that in order to make society better one must first imagine the perfect (or ideal) society and then strive to bring that to reality. So Marx's concept of the world shaping ideas was thought to be doing it backwards. The result of being a product of our environments is the willingness to follow what ever society deems to be the way. Meaning that the very values and traditions we hold to be sacred are the very chains that hold us in oppression. This is a must for capitalist society which can not survive if the oppressed do not hold the illusion that their oppression is not that at all, but that it is the good and right way to live and succeed in our society. If the proletariats do not believe that with hard work and perseverance they might one day become a bourgeois they will realize their oppression and fight against the system which will bring about social change.

Revolution is as much a part of human history as religion. History has shown us that when the oppressed of the social class system has had enough and realized it, revolution or social reform has to occur. Once the time has come for capitalism to fall we will see another revolution or a major change in social structure, but to what? Marx says that it will be communism. But, not the type of communism we were witness to in Russia. Russian communism failed because capitalism had not run its full course and the Russian, as well as the worlds, economy was not ready for true communism. Capitalism while resilient can not last forever because it has in internal conflict. It depends on globalization. Once that has been achieved there will be no more markets to add to the collective. If we look closely we can see it happening already. America and other capitalist nations are trying to expand capitalism into the few remaining places that are resisting our ideologies and then shrouding it in a war on terror. True we needed to do something to protect our nation from terrorism, but what a better way to do it than to force them to conform to our ways of life under capitalism. Granted it is a much better existence