Forums → WEPR → What is Communism?

Communism is simply a terrible ideology, but it is often misunderstood, especially on an Internet where all sorts of falsehoods run wild. I will attempt to explain what Communism is as well as its history as best as I can. I suppose I have an agenda behind this, because my family lived in Beijing at the height of Mao's power.

Let's look into the idea of Marxism first. Marx was not part of the proletariat, or working class. He was a member of the middle class who looked at the plight of the working class and saw the terrible working circumstances that they lived in. So you could say that communism began with a genuine interest in helping these people. Marx decided in a couple of rules that became the main ideas of Communism.

1. History is a series of class conflict. Marx found inspiration in the ideas of Hegel, who said that new ideas will clash with the status quo until a synthesis of the ideas results. To put this in an analogy, the Romans used to worship a variety of Pagan Gods. When Christianity came along, there was a brief struggle of ideas that resulted in a new Christianity becoming the main belief, a Christianity with additional motivations of materialism and with new beliefs and rituals, such as the date of December 25 for Christmas. In the same way, Marx applied the idea of idea conflict and substituted classes. He argued that history chronicled the exploitation and the alienation of the working classes by the "upper class."
2. The ultimate triumph of the working class. Marx believed, however, that eventually, the working class would wake from its oppression, band together, and overthrow the bourgeoisie (middle and upper classes), using their past experience of being exploited to avoid exploiting others. This communist utopia would result in the collective ownership of everything by everyone. Unfortunately, this point has numerous shortcomings. For one, Marx expected developed nations like Britain and France to adopt Communism first, rather than the poorly-developed Russians. The exact opposite happened. Moreover, the working class still has not found unity. Even to this day, we categorize the working class by their occupation: plumber, mechanic, laborer, etc., and even the working class still uses this categorizing scheme. When people say that "If humans were perfect, Communism would succeed," they mean that if the proletariat leading the revolution were perfect, then communism would happen. However, if the people were really perfect, would they really be prompted to rise against the bourgeoisie instead of working industriously? Instead, throughout history, we have seen that the few who set themselves to lead their fellow proletariat were corrupted by the power they received, using it to gain and consolidate more and more power.
3. Ideology. Marx mentioned ideology several times without actually defining it. According to his confidant Engels, ideology is the rules that the dominant-class-ruled society sets to confuse the subjugated class. In other words, in the case of capitalism, it was argued that the upper class used capitalism to confuse the working class into having private property. The upper class would have the agenda of keeping the working class working for them. Ideology is extremely important to any Communist country. To the Communists, the idea of fostering a perfect ideology was extremely important to them, and that is exactly why there is so much propaganda and censorship in Communist countries.
4. Labor Theory of Value and the evil of capitalism. Marx looked at how hard the working class worked and sympathized with him. What this theory means is that the only thing that should determine the cost of a commodity is the amount of time and effort it takes to make it. Marx did acknowledge, however, that different objects had a use value (the direct use of it) and an exchange value (the market price). For example, the use value of firewood is that you can burn it and it keeps you warm, while the exchange value goes back to the basics of the Labor Theory of Value. Marx argued that capitalism was stiffing the working class; that capitalism wasn't giving workers their fair share of the money. He called the gap between what they should earn and what they actually earned the "surplus value." He also argued that capitalism destroyed social relationships over more objective relationships; in other words, people were becoming overconcerned about the market price of a good instead of how much work it actually took to make it. He called his "Commodity Fetishism." There are some glaring problems with this. Economists both in his time and in more recent times have shown that there are many other factors to the price of a good, including the prices of its raw materials, the skill required to make the good, and all other costs (the electricity to run a factory, for instance). Marx's absolute claim that the only source of profit is the exploitation of workers has seen much criticism as well.