Marxism Essay, Research Paper

Marxism is a type of scientific socialism. Karl Marx was a communist used this to differentiate his ideas from the utopian socialist. His main idea was ?Workers of the world unite.? Marx also wrote the book ?The Communist Manifest?, in 1848.

Marxian beliefs included economic interpretation of history, class struggle, surplus value, Inevitability of socialism, and dictatorship of the Proletariat. Economic interpretation of history was the ideas that: all history is based on money, land, and the group that controls the wealth also controls the power. Class struggle is the fact that there will always be a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Surplus value shows that the capitalist pays the worker only enough to survive, and the value of goods produced by the worker minus wages paid to the worker equals the surplus value. Inevitability of socialism is that everything runs in a cycle, pay workers only enough to stay alive, which leads to workers buying power decreasing, which leads to depression, which will eventually lead to the collapse of capitalism. Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the belief of a classless society.

Socialism was partly rooted in the French Revolution. Early Socialist writers are given the label ?Utopian Socialist,? this name was given to them by Karl Marx who viewed these early writers with contempt because he felt they offered non-scientific, unrealistic solutions to the problem of modern society. Utopian socialists believed in the expansive possibilities available to mankind and that it was poor environments that corrupted human nature. They also believed that capitalist over-emphasized production, under-emphasized distribution, and possessed other serious flaws such as unemployment and the suffering brought about by low wages. These early Socialists provided no single answer to society?s problems