Communism in the Soviet Union and Why it Failed
Communism is defined as "a system of political and economic organization in
which property is owned by the community and all citizens share in the enjoyment
of the common wealth, more or less according to their need." In 1917 the rise
of power in the Marxist-inspired Bolsheviks in Russia along with the
consolidation of power by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the word communism
came to mean a totalitarian system controlled by a single political party. This
came to justify that the means of production is controlled and the wealth is
distributed with the goal of producing a classless or possibly a stateless
society. The ideological meaning of communism arose in 1848 with the
publication of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They
believed that communism is inevitable and is an outcome of the historical
process. They believed that the "struggle between an exploiting class, the
capatalists at present age, and an exploited class, the workers, would enter a
crucial stage in the period of capitalism where industrialization occurs and
that the effects of industrialization is to heighten and intensify the internal
contradictions in capitalism." To put it bluntly they believed that the
ownership of industry would be in fewer and fewer hands where the workers would
plunge into a state of ever-increasing misery. These impoverished workers grow
in numbers and organize themselves into a political party which would lead a
revolution in which they dispose of the capitalists. The proletariat would
establish a society governed by a " dictatorship of the proletariat" based on
communal ownership of the wealth. Accordi ...