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... he ideas of Socialism, Marx published a few highly controversial news articles and had to end up fleeing to France in fear of being arrested. He continued to write controversial articles and books and soon after became friends with Fredrick Engels, a man who had written on the oppression of English workers. As they had different strong points, the two men decided to work together to get their point to a larger audience. After trips to England and settlement in Belgium, Marx wrote the lead pamphlet of the Communist party known as The Communist Manifesto, which was based on a writing of Engels called Principles of Communism. It was published in 1848 and soon after, the Belgian government expelled Marx from the country.
Only a year later, Marx's excitement about the possibility of a world revolution began to fade. He was expelled from Germany and France before finding safety in London, where he lived in poverty with his wife and their children. By 1852, Marx was writing articles for international newspapers, mostly American newspapers. With the income from this and an inheritance from his wifes family, he was able to move into nicer quarters with his family. Unfortunately, his luck changed and both he and his wife became very ill; his wife was left deaf. He fell into debt once more but was pulled out by a wealthy German socialist, who offered him a job in Germany that Marx refused.
Despite the refusal, the man continued to send Marx money until his death in 1864. In 1867, Marx published Das Kapital, which was an analysis of Communism and his belief that capitalism was doomed to kill itself in time. He began work on a second volume of the work along with his daughter Eleanor, but the work was slow, especially after his daughter left to peruse a career in Brighton. By 1881, both Marx and his wife Jenny were sick, and on 14 March 1883, Marx died. Within The Communist Manifesto, Marx describes the goals of Communism and the theories of the movement. The main idea of Communism, of course, is that of class struggles and the exploitation that these struggles cause.
The classes that Marx speaks of are caused by the means of production in a society; the heads of industry dominate above all others and make the lower classes their theoretical slaves. According to Marx, however, eventually the means of production and their relationships with society will diverge and a revolution will be caused by the lower classes, creating a new class that will become the new ruling class. In detail, the modern society of Marx's time was dominated by the class conflict between two sects: the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and the proletariat, or wage-labourers. As time passes, however, the productivity of the inherently unstable capitalism will begin to fail. When this failure occurs, the proletariat will rise up and revolt against the bourgeoisie and take all private property, thus leading to a classless social order in which all things are co-owned by every person. As this is the main idea of Communism, the public owning of everything, the Communist party intends to support any revolution that leads to the extermination of capitalism and the institution of a Communism form of government.
After this revolution, the Communists intend to take control of the new proletarian government and stay in position there as the new society is laid out, and then finally step down when they are no longer needed. Of course, this kind of idea leads to some dissent: why would the Communists want to take over the government and remove all private property? Wouldnt this remove the right of the people to earn things for their hard work? No, Marx remarks, because by removing private property and making it public, the Communists remove a huge block in society's path.
Up until this point, the capitalists have been using private property as a way to exploit the proletariat; whilst they enjoy the best of everything, most of society doesnt have anything, but they continue to dupe the common man into thinking that he can be like them. In response to even more dissent from the public, Marx continues. Many believe that if the system of work-and-prize is deleted, no one will work because there is no reason to work. Marx battles this by saying that capitalist society would have killed itself long before, as the people who actually receive anything in a capitalist society are the people who dont work.
Others claim that because of the disappearance of classes, culture will also disappear. Although Marx disputed this, time would prove this true in the Russian soviets. When the topic of the abolition of family arises, Marx replies that it should be abolished because families are only about capital in modern times, and because of this the family exploits the children for capital gain. On the same vein, people complain that Communism doesnt allow for nationality, something that Marx explains by saying that members of the proletariat do not have countries, for they all have the same woes. After addressing these things, Marx continues with how the Revolution will take place: seizing of the government, redistribution of public lands, institution of new taxes and abolishment of inheritance, confiscation of the land of anti-Communists, state centralisation of all previously government-held industries and transportation, a combination of all aspects of society, and the establishment of free education. Once these steps have been taken, society will begin to lose its previous character and become more homogenous.
After this discussion, Marx moves on to discussing and refuting all other types of Socialist and Communist literature and concludes with a discussion of Communists in contact with other revolutionary parties and the infamous line WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! In light of this, the typical movement is from the ideology to the first place that Communism was employed. Following the bloody Russian Revolution of 1917, a government headed by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin was instituted in Russia. From the beginning, the Bolsheviks were not concerned with matters of economy, but rather focused singularly on the translation of Marxism from paper to reality. Borrowing ideas from Germany and Marx, Lenin demanded the state control of banks, which led to great unrest amongst the Russians and did not help the situation of the impending civil war versus the new government and the Provisional one that it expelled. With complete control of the government, Lenin was able to impose complete Communism on the Russians through the system of war communism in which all private property was taken forcefully.
This, although sticking with the Marxist doctrine of abolishment of private property, did nothing to stabilise the economy. Fearful for the outcome of his country, Lenin allowed for some capitalism in the New Economic Plan, which he put into effect in the early 1920 s. Unfortunately, Lenin's ideas for a fresh Russia were never seen to their end, as Lenin grew increasingly ill. His followers were not so sure about his ideas for Russia, and once he was out of the picture following his death in 1922, the ideas of Leninism began to become muddled and by the time Stalin ascended to power, the entire outlook of Russian Communism had changed.
Instead of being like the perfect world that Marx imagined, life was becoming exactly like life on the farm in Orwell's Animal Farm. Although Lenin left a few names in his final testament, Josef Stalin was the one who took the reins of the Russian government. Contrary to the belief of both Marxism, which called for the merging of all aspects of industry and agriculture, and Leninism, which used the New Economic Policy, Stalin created his own ideology that called for a programme of forced industrialisation. As presented in 1984, Stalin instituted what he called his Five-Year Plan. This plan took all industry under the power of the Russian government and extracted funds from the peasantry to assure that the plan was finished when Stalin wished it to be finished.
In accordance with the plan, all people were rushed to collective farms and their own land collectivized. If people refused, they were sent to hard labour camps in Siberia; although Stalin liked to pretend that this was done by the peasants themselves, in reality, it wasnt. This was just one of many lies that Stalin told the world in his attempt to spread the untruth that Russian socialism was working perfectly. There was strict food rationing and Stalin-created catastrophes designed to pull the Russian people together under the Communist regime. Stifled by his own paranoia, Stalin ordered the deaths and disappearances of many people within his government. As predicted by anti-Communists in Marx's time, culture began to die out because all intellectuals were barred by censorship.
Not only did culture disappear, but also the ethics and morals of Russians themselves began to suffer. In another deviation from Marxist doctrine, Stalin began a huge campaign of Russian nationalism, something which ended up making the Russian people identify the Communist government as the majority part of their picture of Russia; in fact, most Russians even in the current day cannot think back to the time of Stalin without feeling some nostalgia. Thankfully, Stalin died in 1953 and a period of de-Stalinisation occurred across Russia. The country rid itself of the image of Stalin (although many still consider his image holy, as was apparent in Remnicks Lenin's Tomb) and quickly returned to the worship of Vladimir Lenin under Nikita Khrushchev.
The institution of Communism had proven to be a failure in the actual human world, where human nature prevails in all circumstances and cannot be eradicated by some operation like is shown in Zamyatin's We. According to Pipes, countries that live under Communist rule all experience the same things: a sharp decline in living standards, the loss of their peoples freedoms and rights, and the emergence of a leader who consolidates all of the power and assumes all of the rights of the people whose rights he has stolen. In short, Richard Pipes managed to say it best in his conclusion of his work Communism: A History: Needless to say, such an outcome is the very antithesis of the Marxist vision, which saw Communism as driven by impersonal economic forces and leading to boundless freedom for all. (Pipes, 144) All of the literature employs at one time or another ideas from the others and each manage to exemplify the failings of Communism as presented by Pipes. Orwell especially tied in his work in with Zamyatin's, having read the latter's work before beginning his. They all have endings typical of each other in which it is determined that no one can win against the system once it is set up, for the system controls everything, even peoples thoughts. Although they are so alike, there are still ones that are the epitome of whatever category they can be lumped in.
Whilst it is apparent that a book such as Animal Farm is a response to Stalinism and Brave New World is a reaction to the insane industrialisation of the time in which it was written, the other two are perhaps different. By the use of Ludmilla Petrushevskayas The Time: Night, which, although is fiction, was based on real-life post-Communist Russia, it seems that of all of the books, the closest to what actual Russian Communism was is George Orwell's 1984. The disappearances of people, the changing of history to fit in with what the administration wanted, the poverty of lower class members, and many other horrible things are found in both pieces of literature. On the other hand, with the ideas behind Marx's The Communist Manifesto, it seems as though Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is the closest literature to the ideas of pure Communism.
There are absolutely no parties and the Benefactor is elected unanimously. Everyone has the same amount of everything and all live the same way. There is no private property even down to people not owning other people like people own children or lovers. Everything is equal, which is what Marx intended in his utopian world.
In conclusion, although Marx meant well with his doctrines on Communism, they really cannot exist in the real world. The authors of the novels used in this essay have shown that even if the world devises ways to rid itself of reactionaries, there are always those fragments of human nature that remain and will be hard, if not impossible, to break. Communist systems have been attempted by the governments of Russia, China, and even a couple of South East Asian countries, but none of them have worked out to the idea that Marx had for Communist countries. Whether they failed because of sour dictators or eventually had to give in to some methods of capitalism, the fact is still that Communism cannot work in our world of human nature; even our literature admits to that fact. Works Cited Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
New York, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. , 1998. Liukkonen, Petri Aldous Huxley. 2002. Kuusankosken Kaupunginkirjasto. 30 May 2004. < web > Liukkonen, Petri George Orwell. 2002. Kuusankosken Kaupunginkirjasto. 30 May 2004. < web > Liukkonen, Petri Yevgeny Zamyatins. 2002. Kuusankosken Kaupunginkirjasto. 30 May 2004. < web > Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto.
New York, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. , 1988. Orwell, George. 1984.
New York, Signet Classic, 1950. Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York, Signet Classic, 1996. Petrushevskaya, Ludmilla. The Time: Night.
New York. Pantheon Books. 1994. Pipes, Richard. Communism: A History.
New York, Modern Library, 2003. Suny, Ronald Gregory. The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents. New York, Oxford University Press, Inc. , 2003. Unknown. Karl Marx. 26 May 2004.
Spartacus Educational. 31 May 2004. < web > Zamyatins, Yevgeny. We. New York, Penguin Books, 1993.
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Research essay sample on Facets Of Russian Communism Within Fictional Utopian Literature
