The Communist Manifesto

[admin]

I wrote this for class.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848). Translated by Samuel Moore in cooperation with Fredrick Engels, 1888. http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1848-CM

   The Communist Manifesto is by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Frederic Engels is the founding document of Socialism, Marxism, and Communism. It deals with the idea that there are class struggles throughout History. They espouse the view that the “proletariat”, their name for the working class, is in constant struggle with the bourgeois, the upper aristocratic class. This theory is what paved the way to Communism in the former Soviet Union and many other countries throughout the World.

   Their ideas of the working class are flawed. They use their view of History to assume that just because someone is poor and part of the working class, they automatically identify with the mythical proletariat cause. Mingled with atheism, this movement wants to strip people of their religious identities. This movement was responsible for the spiritual annihilation of many souls in Eastern Europe as well as physical murder by Communist Marxist dictators such as Joseph Stalin. The working class is much better off without Communism imposed on them. The failed experiment of Communism in Russia did not work and it never works anywhere.

[Ambiorix]

The only communist countries in the world are Western European. E.g. Sweden, Denmark. Belgium.
These countries are a working man's paradise....
But are very expensive to hire workers from...
The Soviet republics were governed by an elite, that had as much privileges as the previously ruling aristocracy.
remember the Romanian tyrant Nikolai Chauchescu , Cuban dictator Castro, the Corean butcher kim-yun-il, Mao...

Marx was at least totally wrong on one aspect : He predicted that people would become happier, if they would have a better standard of living, and more material wealth.
We see that the opposite is rather true: the richest countries in the world, with a good distribution of wealth are not happier than other nations.

[Ambiorix]

Marx was at least totally wrong on one aspect : He predicted that people would become happier, if they would have a better standard of living, and more material wealth.
We see that the opposite is rather true: the richest countries in the world, with a good distribution of wealth are not happier than other nations.

But wasn't Marx against material wealth?

I think Marx was against the accumulation of wealth, in the hands of a super-rich elite only,
he wanted a distribution of that wealth among all the workers.

[MassuhDGoodName]

Re:  "...Yeah good for them but where did Communism lead them? It only collapsed!..."

Yes, it collapsed under its own hypocrisy and lack of viability.

However, that being said, Communism (it wasn't really Communism, but more of a socialistic authoritarianism) led Russia from a 17th Century standard of living into a 20th Century lifestyle and civilization literally almost overnight, all without a free market economy and all without the freedoms we so cherish here in the U.S.

Using fear, brutality, and a willingness to reach set goals without regard to human rights, the USSR achieved a rough "parity" with the United States in mere decades, and this achievement was accomplished in spite of having to fight WWII and repel (successfully) a massive Nazi invasion of the Russian homeland.  Between the brutality of Stalin and the Nazi invasion, Russia lost 20 million citizens, yet had surpassed the Americans in space exploration by the late 1950's.  No mean feat.  The United States, by contrast, spent several centuries and used African slaves as free labor to build a nation which at the beginning of WWII, was still using a horseback cavalry as a military force.  It was in actual fact America's "rebuilding" all of Western Europe after WWII which allowed her to grow rich and assume leadership of the entire Western world.  Were it not for the rebuilding of war-torn Europe, America might have had a far more difficult time competing with Russian Communism for world dominance.

By the end of the Soviet Union, Russians had advanced their standards of living and scientific know-how to the point of inventing and perfecting the ubiquitous "Lasik Surgery" opthomological surgery procedures so popular today in the U.S.A.

And today, a short time after Communism's fall in Russia, it is the Capitalist system of the U.S.A. which appears headed for a collapse from within.  It is difficult to look at the facts of American domestic life in 2008...crimes of unspeakable violence, cruelty and perversion perpetrated upon thousands of young children, a thoroughly corrupt and disfunctional Federal Government and Court System, a failed Educational System, negative birth rate, widening economic disparity between the elite wealthy and the majority of the population, the "war against the Middle Class", rampant homosexuality and sexual licentiousness, profanity, lack of civility, and a national debt so extreme that even today there is not enough money in the entire Planet to pay it back.

All of which lend tremendous credibility to the favorite propaganda line of the Chinese Communist Party:  "Today, Capitalism is in Crisis!"

"Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones."