In "The Communist Manifesto", Karl Marx offers the premise for his socialist ideologies. He asserts that in society people are either an oppressor, or the oppressed. At the time it was written, the Feudal system had ceased and the industrial revolution was at its forefront. The two opposing camps that rose up from the Feudal ashes were the bourgeois and the proletarians. In essence, the bourgeois were the capitalists, and the proletarians were the laborers. In this mindset, there is no middle ground within classes. It was cut and dry. One was either in control of the money or labored at a minimum wage for those who were in control. Marx writes a persuasive argument to gain the sympathies of the laborer. In the process, Marx uses colorful and flowery language to demonstrate the demoralization and plight of the common worker. .
In his vision of an ideal society, the proletarians would claim power and overthrow the bourgeois. The proletarians, now in control of their future, would all hold to the general will. Marx claimed that they would "have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletarians as a whole." Then, of course, there is the abolishment of owning property, leaving inheritances, and so on. All control would be in the hands of the State. It is not shocking to see that communism is easily corruptible by its elitist leaders of the not so distant past (Lenin and Stalin et al). By doing so, the free market, which those who fully bought into the polarized views of Marx, saw as a capitalist monopoly, would be replaced with State sanctions. Karl Marx even placed the family structure under the guise of his communistic ideals. Monogamous marriages were considered unnatural and children would be educated all right, but ever so closely monitored by the State. .
Upon reflection, I think that the hippies who may have lived in communes encompassed more of a sense of what Marx idealized more so than anyone else in history.
