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Communism

In: Social Issues

Submitted By heathr93
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Adlai E Stevenson once said, “Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.” The communism Stevenson is referring to does not match the communism Karl Marx wrote about in his political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s pure, communist economy, the community makes decisions. “In today's communist countries, most economic decisions are made by the government. Its leaders make all economic decisions, a system known as a command economy. The decisions are outlined in a plan that is carried out with laws, regulations and directives.” (useconomy) The communist countries in the twentieth century were not Marx’s idea of communism because the government is involved instead of the community. In an ideal world, Communism would be utopia. Everyone would work together for each other’s benefit instead of personal gain. However, the state of communism in the world in the twentieth century was very different from the utopia Marx alluded to as seen in the communist Russian government. One of the major issues with communism is that it can kill any ambition or motivation of the people in the communist country. Because individual efforts only benefit the community as a whole and there is no chance of moving up in class, communist citizens often have no motivation to work hard in their jobs. This is one of the major reasons for the economic downfall of the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century. The Soviet Union tried to unite the multiple countries and ethnicities under a central, Russian state. “First, the Soviets underestimated the degree to which the non-Russian ethnic groups in the country (which comprised more than fifty percent of the total population of the Soviet Union) would resist assimilation into a Russianized State.”(coldwarmuseum) Many Non-Russian

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