Marx and Engels

The

terms socialism and communism were once used interchangeably. Communism, however, came to designate those theories and movements that advocated the abolition of capitalism and all private profit, by means of violent revolution if necessary. It was the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that laid the conceptual foundation for the communist revolutions and regimes of the 20th century. Marx and Engels dismissed all of the reformers who had come before them as naive utopian socialists, claiming that their plans for communal property could not be achieved in capitalistic societies.

 Marx

and Engels urged the workers of the world to unite to achieve scientific socialism, or communism. Branching out from the theories of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, they trumpeted communism as an unsentimental theory derived from immutable laws of history, and boasted that communism was already a specter haunting all of Europe and was acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power. Engels and Marx were particularly influenced by Hegel's idea that history moves dialectically, but they replaced Hegel's philosophical idealism with materialism.

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dialectical method involves the notion that movement, or process, or progress, is the result of the conflict of opposites.

 Marx

and Engels asserted that the key to understanding human culture and history was the struggle between the classes(conflict theory). They used the term class to refer to a group of people within society who share the same social and economic status. According to Marx and Engels, class struggles have occurred in every form of society, no matter what its economic structure, or mode of production: slavery, feudalism, or capitalism. In each of these kinds of societies, a minority of people own or control the means of production, such as land, raw materials, tools and machines, labor, and money.

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minority constitutes the ruling class. The vast majority of people own and control very little. They mainly own their own capacity to work. The ruling class uses its economic power to exploit workers by appropriating their surplus labor (surplus value theory). In other words, workers are compelled to labor not merely to meet their own needs but also those of the exploiting ruling class. As a result, workers become alienated from the fruits of their labor.

 Analyzing

19th-century capitalistic society, Marx and Engels perceived a class struggle raging between the bourgeoisie, or capitalists who controlled the means of production, and the proletariat, or industrial workers. In their view, the bourgeoisie appropriated wealth from the proletariat by paying low wages and keeping the profits from sales and technological innovation for themselves.

 Marx

and Engels were confident the conflict between the bourgeoisie and increasingly impoverished proletariat was coming to a head in the foremost societies of the West. The inevitable outcome would be a revolution in which the proletariat, taking advantage of strikes, elections, and, if necessary, violence, would displace the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. A political revolution was essential, in Marxs view, because the state is the central instrument of capitalist society.

 Marx

and Engels were almost silent about what would happen after the proletarian revolution. They made provision for a brief transitional period during which workers would form a socialist society with the means of production owned in common. In this period, the working-class majority of the population would need to enact a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat in order to seize the property of the bourgeois minority and stifle attempts to sabotage the popular government.

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previous ruling classes, the working class would not seek to install a new system of domination and exploitation; its goal would be a system of cooperation in which the immense majority, the proletariat, ruled for the benefit of all. Eventually, society would evolve into full communism, characterized by affluence, the abolition of classes, and an end to the dehumanizing division of labor found in earlier forms of society.

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worsening condition of the proletariat, or workers, in western Europe had not brought about the class war predicted by Marx. Many socialist thinkers began to doubt the necessity of revolution and to revise other basic tenets of Marxism. They declared that socialism could best be attained by reformist, parliamentary, and evolutionary methods, including the support of the middle class.