Karl Marx's Concept of Communism Term Paper

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One of these leaders of nations who had subsisted to the promise of Communism is Vladimir Lenin, Revolutionary leader who became the first leader of Soviet Russia, and eventually, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Under Lenin's leadership, he began realizing Marx's vision of a Communist society, where there is no private property and no class stratification. However, Lenin did not subscribe to Marx' belief that it should be the working class who will induce social reform and revolutionize to build a Communist society, in opposition against capitalism. In "What is to be done?," Lenin argues that revolution under a broad organization of revolutionaries made up of "hardened workers" is not feasible, simply because this organization is "loose," making the revolutionaries of workers more susceptible to outside intervention. These interventions, he states, are the police and gendarmes; hence, a broad organization of workers are not ideal, for it will "...achieve neither the one aim nor the other; we shall not eliminate our rule-of-thumb methods, and, because we remain scattered and our forces are constantly broken up by the police, we shall only make trade unions...." What Lenin suggests, then, is an organization of professional revolutionaries, who, despite being less in number than the workers, are more able to accomplish the tasks needed for social changes in the society. The revolutionary of professionals will work and cooperate with the workers to ensure success in enforcing this social change and shift to a Communist society: "Active participation of the widest masses in the illegal press will not diminish because a "dozen" professional revolutionaries centralise the secret functions connected with this work; on the contrary, it will increase tenfold.

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While Marx and Lenin have more or less subsisted to the same ideology and advocacy for a shift from capitalist to Communist societies, Edouard Bernstein offered his critique of the critical theories that Marx and Engel had proposed in "Communist Manifesto." In "Evolutionary Socialism," Bersntein dismisses the philosophers' claim that the future of human society would include a social reform of economic society -- that is, from being capitalist to Communist. He considers their prediction as non-reflective of the realities that human society faces as it entered the 20th century. For Bernstein, their predictions are inaccurate, for the contemporary society reflects a society where "[t]he number of members of the possessing class is to-day [sic] not smaller but larger... The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanies by a decreasing number of arge capitalists but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees. The middle classes change their character but they do not disappear from the social scale."

Bernstein's criticisms of Communism is parallel with the main thrust of the Marshall Plan, a U.S.-funded program wherein financial aid was given to Eastern European countries who have failed in their attempt to implement a socialist economic structure in their nation. Although the Marshall Plan differs from Bernstein defense of capitalism, since the former argues that, as the Eastern European case illustrates, capitalism is the "end of history of man" as Fukuyama puts it, the only economic system that will prevail mainly because it is the only system proven to have induced social progress through material progress and intellectual development......

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