Communist Manifesto

2 Pages 585 Words

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Capitalism is bad!” If Capitalism is so bad, why is it still used in today’s modern world? Although the book The Communist Manifesto has openly addressed many issues of ‘minimum wage’ and ‘exploitation’ the gap between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat” has continued to widen. So how has a book, such as this, really impacted our lives? If anything, it hasn’t! Marx first proposed these ideas nearly two centuries ago, and since that time, society, moreover the world, has managed to drift further and further away from his radical ideas.
In many of Marx’s works, namely The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, he expressed the belief that all civilizations throughout history had inevitably experienced class conflict between workers and the owners of productive property. He further argued that it was this division of classes, which created a conflict that drove civilization through multiple stages of history. Marx called the middle-class owners the bourgeoisie and the workers who did the actual labor the proletariat.
Capitalism is a system in which a wealthy landowner (or owner of a factory) would utilize workers who had to sell their labor for a fraction of what the labor was worth. Marx foresaw the downfall of Capitalism in industrialized countries and saw the rise of Communism in its place. He strongly believed that capitalism would end with a workers’ revolution against the owners of factories and other properties used to produce goods and services. In the revolution, the workers would gain control of economic resources and the government. (Schneck)
In the Communist Manifesto he proposed that in every historical epoch the prevailing economic system by which the necessities of life are produced determines the form of societal organization and the political and intellectual history of the epoch; and that the history of society is a history of struggles bet...