Under Lenin's leadership, he began realizing Marx's vision of a Communist society, where there is no private property and no class stratification. However, Lenin did not subscribe to Marx' belief that it should be the working class who will induce social reform and revolutionize to build a Communist society, in opposition against capitalism. In "What is to be done?," Lenin argues that revolution under a broad organization of revolutionaries made up of "hardened workers" is not feasible, simply because this organization is "loose," making the revolutionaries of workers more susceptible to outside intervention. These interventions, he states, are the police and gendarmes; hence, a broad organization of workers are not ideal, for it will "...achieve neither the one aim nor the other; we shall not eliminate our rule-of-thumb methods, and, because we remain scattered and our forces are constantly broken up by the police, we shall only make trade unions...." What Lenin suggests, then, is an organization of professional revolutionaries, who, despite being less in number than the workers, are more able to accomplish the tasks needed for social changes in the society. The revolutionary of professionals will work and cooperate with the workers to ensure success in enforcing this social change and shift to a Communist society: "Active participation of the widest masses in the illegal press will not diminish because a "dozen" professional revolutionaries centralise the secret functions connected with this work; on the contrary, it will increase tenfold..." While Marx and Lenin have more or less subsisted to the same ideology and advocacy for a shift from capitalist to Communist societies, Edouard Bernstein offered...
He considers their prediction as non-reflective of the realities that human society faces as it entered the 20th century. For Bernstein, their predictions are inaccurate, for the contemporary society reflects a society where "[t]he number of members of the possessing class is to-day [sic] not smaller but larger... The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanies by a decreasing number of arge capitalists but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees. The middle classes change their character but they do not disappear from the social scale."
Notwithstanding his militant stances against capitalism -- and given the "Occupy" movement in the Western societies, some of what he railed against is evident in the market today -- and his archaic promotion of communism, his theories have an important place in educational scholarship. Good debates require diametrically opposed positions, and Marx provides plenty of ammunition for the side of the argument that adopts an anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, anti-globalization position. Works
Karl Marx is one of the most interesting philosophers of the 19th century, and his teaching have contributed immensely to the discussion of political organization for the past 150 years. The social conditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were of the utmost significance to the development of sociology. The chaos and social disorder that resulted from the series of political revolutions ushered in by the French Revolution in
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That may "feel" socialist, but in reality it is still capitalism along with a healthy dose of charity and goodwill to others. In socialism the government requires a person to give, where in capitalism a person gives only if he or she chooses to. There is no requirement for a person to give, but the more people who give the better the chance that society will flourish because there will
Corporate cultures no longer sustain an autocratic, hierarchical design that distances workers from the spirit of their creation. Quite the contrary, many modern corporations are run with programs such as profit sharing. Feedback from employees is encouraged, as companies are becoming more mindful of the ways job satisfaction positively impacts productivity. What Marx and Engels could not and did not envision was the next revolution to follow the Industrial Revolution:
Both of them also realized the necessity of fighting poverty and economic want and did not believe that the mythical 'invisible hand' of the free market economy would do so on its own. They were also common critics of at least some of the aspects of 'Classical Economics' such as the Say's Law. There, perhaps, the similarity between the two ends. Being a conscious opponent of Trotskyism, Keynes was by
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