4.2 Communism/Command Economy: A Model for Economic Decision Making

This type of socialism was proposed by Karl Marx. Marx proposed lived during the height of the Industrial Revolution and questioned the benefits of the capitalist economy for the workers. History, he thought, was a constant move towards a classless society. He saw history as a conflict for control and distribution of resources between various classes. In his book, Das Kapital, he stated that war and class hatred were caused by the competition for resources. With Friedrich Engels, an English industrialist and his brother-in-law, Marx published his economic principles in a book, called the Communist Manifesto. In their work, Marx and Engels laid out a blueprint for a "workers' revolution" and the creation of a socialist (communist) state. They said that all change must be violent in order for real change to take place. The communist revolution would be a spontaneous uprising of class conflict. Eventually the workers would triumph; a new social order would be established that would distribute resources equally for the benefit of all. To do this, the state would have to seize control of the factors of production in a dictatorship of the proletariat, but eventually the need for this dictatorship would become unnecessary because all classes would have their needs taken care of. As a result, there would be no need for government or the modern nation state, and both institutions would "wither away and die".