Socialism is defined as public control of property and resources. Society should produce goods and own property for the good of its own members, and if someone helped make a good, they should be allowed to share in it. The object of production should be to meet human needs. Money would disappear, everyone would take freely in what is produced, and work would be voluntary and as needed. Socialism is a direct opposite to capitalism’s ideas of individuals developing to the best of their own ability. Socialists believe that humans are naturally inclined to help each other rather than advance their own personal interests. Society develops by sharing resources that produce wealth. Advancing one’s own interests leads to exploitation …show more content…
He called this the five stages of economic development. What comes first is primitive communism. Under primitive communism there is shared property, hunting and gathering, and proto-democracy (tribes are led by the best warrior if there is war, the best diplomat if they have steady contact with other tribes and so forth). The second stage is slave society where class is first introduced, statism, agriculture, democracy and authoritarianism (these opposites develop at the same stage. Democracy arises first with the development of the republican city-state, followed by the totalitarian empire), and private property. After the slave society comes the third stage which is feudalism. Here aristocracy, theocracy, hereditary-classes, and nation-states come into play. The fourth stage is the dreaded capitalism. Marx argues that there can’t be neither communism nor socialism without first going through capitalism. In capitalism, the market economy, private property, bourgeois democracy, wages, imperialism, financial institutions (banks), and monopolies are all introduced. Finally after going through all of this, socialism forms after the working class rebels against the bourgeois and establishes socialism. In socialism there is common property, council democracy (the workers govern themselves), and labor vouchers (the individual worker being awarded according to the amount of labor he contributes to …show more content…
Stalin changed the USSR from a revolutionary system of ideas into a conservative and authoritarian theory of state, preaching obedience and discipline as well as great respect for the Russian past. He sought to promote good relations with capitalist countries. The USSR under Stalin industrialized and urbanized rapidly. This goes against all that Marx believed because he said that socialism and communism would be products of workers overthrowing capitalism and industrialization.
The Cold War