A Reply to the Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto and Karl Marx’s idea of communism are very noble and caring dreams
where everybody is equal and all wealth is shared. There are positive and negative aspects to
communism as there are in all societies, the positives being the fact that all the wealth is shared
between the people and as a result there is no hunger, poverty or crime, no rulers and no classes.
The negatives will be shown below. These negative ‘faults’ are the reason why communism would
not work as a society and will not replace capitalism or socialism.
                                          
The first and most important fault is of course human nature. Under communism, people would
work for the welfare of society instead of trying to enriching themselves. There would be no
currency, as people would barter their goods or services for goods or services that another person
has. Unfortunately human nature does not work that way, people will always think of their own
welfare and comfort above another person’s and if their goods or services are worth more than
another person’s they would not want barter with them. Humans also don’t work to their full
potential, if at all, when they are not working to improve their lifestyle, so, with no incentive to
work under communism people will not want to work. Human beings are naturally competitive and
will be able to achieve more when they have something or someone to work against. In a
communist society there would be no competition and therefore people would not be able to work
to their full potential even if they wanted to as they would have nothing to compare their results to
and try to improve on.

Communism also leaves no room for individuality or religion. Communism is centered on the
masses rather than the individual, to try to keep everybody happy rather than just a few people
happy. This again goes against human nature because people like to be unique rather than
following and doing exactly the same things as everybody else. The communist society is also an
atheist society because it is supposed to have a utopian dream, believing in heaven on earth. This
will cause a problem for many, if not most people because it is natural to believe that there is
something more than just what is on this world now. Many people would not be able to live their
lives fully if they could not believe in a higher power. Many people live their lives around their
religions and would not have it any other way (of course these people would be some of those who
would be martyrs ‘for the communist cause’).

Communism has been tried in the past without success because the people fighting for
communism where trying to force communism on the rest of their country, which, instead of
helping people by equally distributing wealth and happiness it would distribute misery. The fact
that the leaders were trying to control what people wanted to do and tried to run the country
themselves defeated the purpose of communism (which is supposed to make everyone equal, no
one ruling over anyone).

One other important fact about communism is that many people will not like the lengths taken to
achieve communism. People do not want to have to have a violent revolution in order to achieve
the communist dream. The communist lifestyle may, in theory, be better than the capitalist
lifestyles because there may not be any crime, hunger or poverty because all the wealth is shared
and there may not be any governments, armies or rulers of any kind, but the majority of people do
not think that the chance (considering human nature) of having all of those positives things is good
enough to justify killing thousands or even millions of people to achieve them.

Mr. Holding Benjamin Torr 11JT

30-01-09