Communism

Essay by matojeUniversity, Master'sA+, July 2004

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Our textbook, Social Problems by James Henslin, says, "Politics provides an excellent illustration of the relative position of men and women in the United States." (Henslin: pg 303) For a final paper, I thought it would be appropriate to do a paper on communism and its role in the changing of the political culture of the time shifting the focus away from the United States, and look at the origins and the fall of communism. We must accept the claim that Lenin's coup that gave birth to an entirely new state, and indeed to a new era in the history of mankind, we must recognize in today's Soviet Union the old empire of the Russians -- the only empire that survived into the mid 1980s.

In their Communist Manifesto of 1848, two famous philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels applied the term communism to a final stage of socialism in which all class differences would disappear and humankind would live in harmony.

Marx and Engels claimed to have discovered a scientific approach to socialism based on the laws of history. They declared that the course of history was determined by the clash of opposing forces rooted in the economic system and the ownership of property. Just as the feudal system had given way to capitalism, so in time capitalism would give way to socialism. The class struggle of the future would be between the bourgeoisie, who were the capitalist employers, and the proletariat, who were the workers. The struggle would end, according to Marx, in the socialist revolution and the attainment of full communism. (Luttwak, pg 64). Socialism, of which Marxism-Leninism is a takeoff, originated in the west. Designed in France and Germany, it was brought into Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century and promptly attracted support among...