Communism Essay Research Paper Communism has long

Communism Essay, Research Paper

Communism has long been heralded in capitalist countries as the root of all evil. However, as with all phobias, this intrinsic fear of communism comes from lack of knowledge rather than sound reasoning. It is the same fear that gave the world the Cold War and McCarthy s Red Scare. The purpose of this paper is neither to support communism over capitalism nor the opposite, rather it is to inform the reader of communism s migration through time and hopefully assist the regression of such fear.

The ideology of communism came out of the minds of two men, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Sowell, 11). Since Marx is the most widely known influence, he will be the one most referred to. It was Marx s belief that private property was the cause of poverty and degradation of the proletariat. Therefore, he came to settle on the idea that no one person should have control over production of goods, ownership of land, and management of funds. In that same token then, no one class should be allowed to have control over these things. He went on to comment that the exploitation of the working class must come to an end. That end would be achieved through revolution. Once this was achieved, everybody would work according to their abilities and then be paid accordingly (Marx 586-617). Soon after, however, technical innovations would create such abundance of goods that everyone works according to his abilities and receives according to his needs. Soon thereafter, money would have no place in society. People would be able to take what they want and in turn would be lacking nothing. Marx also believed that the pleasure of seeing the fruits of labor would be enough to cause man to work (Rieber, 56-62). Countries and people were soon to catch on to this ideology. The two most well know places were Russia and China.

Of the two, Russia was the first to adopt the communist beliefs. Russia already had a long history of peasant insurrections. Most of these uprisings though, were leaderless and highly unorganized. The motives of the rebels were vague and often confused. By the time the government made some improvements to help the peasants, it was too late. In 1917, due to the breakdown of the administration and military order, the peasants moved to carry out their own revolution. They tore down any form of legal and territorial authority and distributed the land in a rough but equal fashion. During this time, a man by the name of Georgi V. Plekanhov had secretly come into Russia bringing Karl Marx s books.

Once there, these books influenced young students who saw the revolution dependent on the proletariat, not the peasant class. One of the people influenced by Plekanhov was a man going by the name of Nikolai Lenin. His revolutionary ardor was strong and he went on to creat a group called the Bolsheviks and they are the ones who would create the revolution needed to change the system.

It began on March 6, 1917 when bread riots erupted in Petrograd, Russia and did not end until the United Soviet Socialist Republic was organized on December 30, 1922. On January 21, 1924, Lenin died and this complicated matters since two people were interested in Lenin s position. A power struggle ensued between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky (Salisbury, xi). Stalin became the Bolshevik party general secretary in 1922, which was one step closer to being the next Lenin. In 1925, Stalin offered a more attractive solution to the Russian people than Trotsky (Rieber, 73-74). Thus in 1927, Stalin scored the first major victory for himself when the Fifteenth All-Union Congress of the Communist Party denounced all deviations of the Stalinist line. Trotsky and any ally of his were banished to the Russian provinces. Here Stalin s ruthless nature began to show. He completely expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union and finally his fear of Trotsky-esque forced him to assassinate Leon Trotsky in 1940 (Kaiser, 246). However, even after Trotsky was assassinated Stalin s fears were never quite dissipated.

Stalin went on to establish a dictatorship, crushing any opposing voices within his party and his country. He would not stop there though, still being enough of a Marxist, he wanted to see the ultimate goal become a reality. He wanted to see a world wide socialist revolution. He and many other Soviet leaders held the furtherance of world revolution above the preservation of the dictatorship. It remained an important goal through the leadership of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. However, this came to the head during the leadership of Gorbachev.

Gorbachev had a country that was falling apart dumped into his lap. Dissension was widespread and in an effort to bring the country back to it s former glory, Gorbachev implemented a program known as Perestroika, or reconstructuring. Its aim was to make good on the promises of socialism or else it would sink to the status of a third world country. One part of Perestroika that was particularly odd was called Glasnost. The purpose of Glasnost was to hear constructive criticism in order to possibly try to implement the ideas in an effort to help the country out of their difficulties. This was much different from Stalin s views.

When western criticism said that Perestroika was slowing down, Glasnost went ahead at full speed, revealing not only the crimes of the Stalin era, but also the horrifying dimensi