Marx's Failed Revolution
1848 AD
1848 1848
00.0W51.30N
MISC

LONDON, ENGLAND
	Capitalism was doomed!
	According to the philosopher Karl Marx, the capitalist system carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. One day, he predicted, a violent revolution would eliminate all social classes and result in a society of plenty for all.
	Like philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Marx believed history was moving inevitably toward a goal. But for Marx this goal was purely economic, the result of a struggle between industrial workers and owners.
	Marx, a German, studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He later moved to Paris where he met Friedrich Engels, who became his lifelong companion and co-author of "The Communist Manifesto" (1848).
	Marx visited London in 1849 for a few weeks, but found so much material in the British Museum that he spent the rest of his life researching and writing his three-volume work, "Das Kapital" (Capital), which examined capitalism and predicted its failure.
	In his writings, Marx argued that the true cost of any product is the labor employed in building it. But the factory owner, he said, doesn't labor to create a product, he just buys the labor and raw materials and sells the resulting product.
	Although laborers contributed the full value of the product, Marx said, factory owners sold the product for more than they paid their workers. Therefore, he said, the difference was stolen from the workers.
	Owners, he predicted, would increase their profits by paying their workers as little as possible, so workers would be increasingly impoverished. Eventually the wealth of the owners and poverty of the workers would lead to revolution.
	Sometime after the revolution, true communism would come. Government would wither away, the new social order would change people so they were no longer hungry for profits or power, religion (which Marx considered a tool of oppression) would disappear, and people would live prosperous lives. Each person would work according to his ability and each person would receive according to his need.
	But communism hasn't worked. While they were in power, communist governments didn't wither away, but attempted the most detailed control of people's lives; the desire for wealth and power didn't disappear; instead of providing prosperity, communism gave poverty; and despite persecution, religion endured.
	This is not to say communism never works, but it only seems to work on a very small scale. In healthy families, for example, members work according to their ability and receive according to their need. Other examples would be some tribal peoples, and members of a small Protestant sect called the Hutterites, who have lived in communal groups since the 1500s.