Why is the communist manifesto wrong

This was because the capitalists made a profit on what they sold. Marx called the profit "surplus value" and thought that it exploited the workers. Marx said that capitalists had alienated the worker from the results of his labor, forcing him to become "enslaved by the machine.

Marx described communists as those who best understood the class struggle. They would unify the proletariat, lead it in the revolution, and take control of the government. During what Marx called the "socialist phase" of the revolution, the new proletarian government would confiscate all capitalist private property like factories, mines, farms, and other businesses.

The government would then operate these enterprises for the benefit of the workers. When the proletariat finally controlled economic production, Marx declared that all classes would disappear and class struggles would end. In this "communist phase," there would no longer be a need for a government. Marx expected that the proletarian revolution would soon occur in Germany or England and then take place worldwide.

He ended the Communist Manifesto with these rousing words:. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world unite! By the time Marx published the Communist Manifesto in , worker uprisings had broken out in Germany and several other European countries.

Marx and Engels moved to Germany where they wrote articles, attacking the government. By , however, the European governments had crushed all the revolts. Marx concluded that the revolts had been premature.

Expelled from Belgium and again from France, Marx took his wife and family to London, which remained his home for the rest of his life. But he never held a steady job. Harassed constantly by creditors and threatened with eviction, Marx appealed to Engels for financial support. Engels, who was working for his father's textile firm in Manchester, responded generously. With help from Engels and some timely family inheritances, Marx supported his growing family.

Marx adored his children and loved to make up stories to tell them. He was devastated when three of them died within a few years of one another, leaving three surviving daughters. In between firing off numerous essays critical of other European radicals, Marx spent his time in the British Museum researching capitalism.

In , after many delays, distractions, and health problems, Marx finally published the first volume of Capital , a major analysis of capitalism and his most important work. In Capital , Marx pointed out numerous contributions that capitalism had made to economic progress, especially in the area of technology. But he wrote that capitalism was doomed. He predicted that as capitalism developed, a small number of powerful monopolies would drive many enterprises out of business.

To successfully compete against one another, these "cut throat" monopolies would reduce worker wages. Finally, a class struggle between the workers and the capitalists would bring on a revolution, replacing capitalism with communism. Marx was quite vague in his description of society after the revolution. In an essay, he described the government during the "socialist phase" as "the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx also expected that once the proletariat had taken control of all capitalist property, wealth would flow more abundantly for the benefit of all. Then in the "higher phase of communist society," individuals would finally be free to develop their abilities and talents to the fullest. Marx put it this way: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

In , Marx published his last writing, a short preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto. Russia was mainly a rural peasant society with little industrial development.

Thus, Marx had ignored it as lagging far behind in the march toward revolution. He now, however, admitted that the Russian peasants were at "the starting-point for a communist development.

Karl Marx died in London on March 14, Only 11 people showed up at the funeral. His lifelong friend and benefactor, Friedrich Engels, spoke at his graveside. Engels predicted that Marx's "name and work will endure through the ages. Karl Marx is an important figure in philosophy, sociology, economics, and history. Marx developed a detailed explanation of the entire course of human events. For example, his theory of class struggle attempts to explain why and how human history develops. Marx also produced many insights as to how groups of people behave, how capitalism operates, and how technology sometimes has negative effects on workers.

But the proletarian revolution that Marx expected never happened in any advanced industrialized country. Contrary to Marx's predictions, economic conditions gradually improved for most workers in capitalist societies. Marx also failed to anticipate major reforms like the expansion of the right to vote, laws abolishing child labor, social security, and the right of workers to join unions.

Workers in capitalist countries seemed more interested in improving their wages and working conditions than joining a revolution. Of course, a communist revolution did occur in Russia in Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the new Soviet Union, concentrated all power in the Communist Party. After Lenin, Joseph Stalin used violence and starvation to end private ownership of agricultural land, causing the death of millions of peasants. The Communist Party became a privileged ruling class, relying on force to stay permanently in control.

His main body of work was published in three thick volumes, under the title "Das Kapital" Capital , written between and Marx was a brilliant — albeit flawed — economic thinker.

He was also a strong-willed, opinionated egoist who was always sure he was right. At leftist meetings, he had a tendency to bully and humiliate anyone who tried to disagree with his theses.

His wealthy friend Engels was an effective promoter and organizer who believed in Marx and his ideas with messianic fervor, and supported him financially. As fate would have it, this combination of brilliance, controversy and self-promotion meant that Marx's reputation rose far above that of rival leftist political economists.

Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his ideas came to be accepted as unchallengeable dogmas on the revolutionary political left. As a result, when the credibility of Europe's royal houses collapsed in the wake of the disastrous First World War that they had misled the Continent into, it was Marx's ideas and doctrines that leftist revolutionaries tried to implement.

Marx's writings became the Bible of the revolutionaries who took power in Russia in , and later in other countries. Even today, after Marxism-inspired state communism has been thoroughly discredited by the dark experiences of history, innumerable leftist groups define themselves as "Marxists" and cling to the bearded economist's ideas with quasi-religious intensity.

Many insist that Marx's theories were largely correct — and the disasters of real-world Communism only occurred because his ideas were not implemented correctly.

Marx's core idea was that the whole of human history could be explained as a materialist struggle between classes, playing out a zero-sum game over control of the means of production and the distribution of what is produced. He based this idea on his and Engels' observation of the exploitation of the 19th century "proletariat," or factory workers, by factory owners industrialists , whom Marx termed "capitalists," or owners of capital.

By "capital," Marx meant the physical means of production, rather than money financial capital , though he recognized that it was necessary to first own financial capital in order to buy physical capital. Marx gave a fair bit of attention in "Das Kapital" to the question of how businessmen initially obtain enough money to buy factories.

He termed this "the problem of primitive accumulation," and showed that it was nearly impossible to acquire an initial fortune by saving up excess money from selling one's labor. He argued that the original sources of fortunes large enough to launch a person, or a family, into the capitalist class were almost always some form of theft, such as the seizure and privatization of public lands, acquisition of booty through war, colonialism, enslavement of workers, or financial fraud.

On that score, history shows innumerable examples confirming Marx's hypothesis. The acquisition of great fortunes by Russian and Eastern European oligarchs who seized public property in the wake of the collapse of state communism is a recent case in point.

In Volume One of "Das Kapital," Marx said that capitalists made "profits" unfairly, by seizing the "surplus value of labor," which he defined as the difference between the factory owner's costs and the money he was able to obtain by selling goods produced in the factory. Since the workers produced the goods, Marx argued, it was they, not the capitalist, who had a moral claim on earning all the sales revenues. The capitalist was, in this view, essentially a parasite. This led directly to Marx's fundamental political-economic prescription: The "proletariat" should seize the means of production.

Marx thought this would inevitably occur, in part because the proletariat was much more numerous than the capitalist class, and so would eventually win the "class struggle" — all it needed was sufficient "class consciousness" to recognize the nature of its predicament. Collectivization of agriculture seems to have been particularly disastrous for farm-based societies like 20th century China and Russia. But overthrowing the system has usually been a disaster. Successful revolutions tend to be those like the American Revolution, which overthrow foreign rule while keeping local institutions largely intact.

Violent social upheavals like the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Civil War have, more often than not, led both to ongoing social divisions and bitterness, and to the rise of opportunistic, megalomaniac leaders like Stalin and Mao. Even the French Revolution, though it eventually led France to become a stable liberal democracy, only did do after almost a century of atrocities, short-lived dictatorships and civil strife.

Meanwhile, the most successful examples of socialism — the mixed economies of the Scandinavian countries, France, Germany, and Canada — came not from the violent overthrow of the old order, but from gradual change within the democratic, partly capitalist system. These countries have plenty of private businesses, but also fairly high taxes, universal health care, strong social safety nets and a variety of other government tools that keep capitalism from resulting in runaway inequality.

Even in the supposedly capitalist bastion of the U. Meanwhile, almost all rich countries now have progressive income taxes, universal public education and laws against child labor — all things that Marx demanded in in the Communist Manifesto.