Beginners Guide to Marxism
Marxism is the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was later developed into Communism by their followers. They wrote two books called "The Communist Manifesto" in 1847 and "Das Kapital" in 1867. Marx's theory was that human history was largely determined by the "history of class struggles"and the book reflected the goals of communism and how it should be spread. Marx felt that Capitalism was unfair to the working class and all the profits that were made could only be enjoyed privately by the upper class. He also felt that in a capitalist society, everything was reduced to a question of cash and all the companies would try to lower the cost of labor to the lowest rate possible. This was very unfair for the working class as they had to work for long hours and the sales from the products they made would be enjoyed by the upper class. Socialism was Marx's way of solving capitalism. His idea was the stage of history and class structure immediately following the next revolution, in which power was passed from the upper class to the rural peasantry. He felt that the work of the working class was very undervalued and that they would be the best people to control the society. Lenin was inspired by Marx's work on Socialism so he took this idea and adapted it to Russia. Lenin believed that, although Russia had only just stopped being a feudalistic country and was barely capitalist he believed that he could skip a lot of the process to becoming a communist country with a socialist revolution. His other major tweak of Marx's socialism was that Lenin realized that the working class in Russia was so small that the peasants also had to be part of the socialist revolution. There are many forms of socialism that are very similar to the original idea by Karl Marx but have small revisions in them. These forms include, Marxist communism, which is a classless society based on common ownership of the means of production, Stalinism, which was practiced by the soviet Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, his socialism made very few new theoretical contributions, Maoism, which was practiced by the Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, believed that the class struggle continues throughout the entire socialist period. Although a very smart and logical political system, Socialism also has many flaws, the government has to make sure everything is working properly in the state, whereas in a capitalist state the government doesn't have to interfere too much. Socialism is very anti ambition. It doesn't encourage people to try new things and pursue their interests and try something different, it can also make people very lazy and unproductive. In a socialist country it is very hard to a have a balance in wealth throughout the country, socialism keeps the rich very rich and the poor very poor. And lastly socialism is basically impossible to do without any form of inequality.