Communist Manifesto Analysis

467 Words2 Pages

The lust for possession that Locke had addressed had grown even more violent and unbridled for nearly two centuries when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto. The tools of the Industrial Revolution served as levers for use by the wealthy in the agculumuation of even more wealth. As property and money were squirreled away by individuals, the most greedy of men were born into a more wealthy class of society. Written on the eve of the German Revolution, the manifesto speaks out against the bourgeoisie for it “agglomerated population, centralized the means of production and has concentrated property in a few hands” (p. 40). The greed of this upper tier has grown unbearable and intolerable; the bourgeoisie with its absurd means of manufacturing and …show more content…

The solution for Marx was the absence of social classes as well as the common ownership of the means of production. Communism calls forth an idealistic world where the apples are not picked for one’s own existence but for the wealth of society. One gathers all that they are able and the fruit of their labor belongs to the community; society then distributes the apples needed for survival to each individual. This ideology strives to achieve an equal existence for everyone, as popularized by Karl Marx: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The redistribution of wealth extinguishes the danger of possession because both the means of production and the products themselves are controlled by the state. The issues with property, the greed of possession, were not supposed to be possible because citizens would not own anything. But as history reveals, this plan of simply removing the cause fails as soon as it becomes acquainted with reality. Mankind is not a nice race; humans thrive on competition for survival and