Karl Marx and Communism

Karl Marx was a german who lived during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. To Marx, industrialization was simply an extension of feudalism, it was not much different that lords and serfs. There was still great inequality among the classes. Marx believed the modern world was divided into two separate and competing social classes; the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Bourgeoisie was the class of people who owned the means of production. They were the factory and business owners. They were people like Bill Gates, Donald Trump, George Steinbrener, etc. The Proletariat was the working class. They were the people who punched a clock and went to work every day. According to Marx, the proletariat "sold" their labor to the bourgeoisie. They would work for whoever paid them the most money. But Marx thought that the proletariat was doomed to forever work for low wages. He saw Industrialization as a system where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The proletariat were forever at the mercy of the bourgeoisie. They could never really get ahead. Marx also thought that the Industrial Revolution was dehumanizing for workers. Workers became "an appendage to a machine", as they worked at a thankless and repetitive job in a factory. Marx envision large companies taking control and buying all the smaller companies (something that has happened quite a bit in modern capitalism). He also predicted the rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer (something that has also happened in the US over the past 25 years). In general, Marx saw the Industrial Revolution, and the economic system of Capitalism, as a poor system. He believed that since there were way more workers (proletariat) than owners (bourgeoisie), the workers would eventually get fed up, start a revolution and take over. In fact, Marx encouraged workers to start a revolution (workers of the world unite!). According to Marx, once the workers of the world took control, they would install a temporary government, continue to make products (but they would only make what they would need), and then a system of communism would take over. Under communism, everyone would make the same amount of money. Society would produce only what it needs. Everyone would be treated the same, there would be no social classes. And there would be no private ownership. No body would own their own homes or businesses, everything would be owned by the state or the government. Under Marx's communism the government would gradually fade away because in such a pure system of sharing, there would be no need for government. Marx's ideas were very influential. Eventually Russia tried communism but it failed after about 70 years. Communism proved to be a less affective economic system that capitalism. There are still some communist countries in the world today (Cuba, China, North Korea), but these countries are not practicing the pure form of communism that Marx envisioned.