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government or politics

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23 March 2007

Communism : The Clumsy Implementation of a Good Idea

Table of Contents

Introduction page 3

Basics of Communism page 5

Socialism as Idealized by Robert Owen page 6

French Socialist Thought in the 19th Century page 8

The Communist Manifesto and Russian Revolution page 9

The Russian Revolution page 10

Superpower Tension and the Role of the Media page 13

Modern Communist China page 14

The Failure of Communism page 16

Conclusion page 18

Works Cited

page 20

Introduction

The idea of the working class uniting and taking power is not new although it was not clearly labeled until the 19th century by European scholars like Robert Owen and de Tocqueville . Perhaps the first mention of this ideology was by other than Plato in his epic work Republic The Greek scholar philosophized about the future of a world where the worker was not only cherished by society on the whole , but realized this strength and banded together with the rest of his class to accomplish great things in the name of technology and justice (Rice , 1998 . In its early days , even thousands of years after Plato 's writings , socialism gathered strength as the way towards a better and more fairly constructed civilization

British and French scholars wrote of the possibilities inherent in a world that was structured by the principles of the working class melded with that of the middle class indeed a world where structure defied the class system and saw all its citizens on an equal standing with one another in terms of finance , luxury and proximity to food and shelter Eventually , of course , this ideology was adopted by the great German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , whose work would be touted by Russian revolutionaries and eventually change the face of the Eurasian political landscape in a way that persists even today . The fact is that despite these grandiose and altogether positive ideas socialism was adopted by political leaders who failed to implement the school of thought properly according to the early literature . Because of this , we have seen the rise and crash of the great Soviet Union , the crumbling of ex-communist states and the flat refusal of the United States and many other Western countries to adopt even the simplest and most fundamental aspects of socialism . Where did the policy implementation go wrong , and why does the United States continue to speak out against the so-called evils of socialism and its close sister communism while other nations like China have grasped the idea with both hands

The difference in opinion can be traced right back to that all important document , The Communism Manifesto , and how those well meaning principles were quickly warped by political leaders who in actuality sought the same power as the monarchs they had overthrown . Today therefore , political activists in power in the United States are still quite fearful of the socialist structure , while China has effectively isolated itself from the rest of the...

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