Should i become a communist

Facing yawning inequality, heavy debt burdens, obscene costs of living, and stagnant wages, young people have warmed up to redistributive politics. We could have that! That division between socialism and authoritarianism is one that Sanders, unlike many of his peers, has always made: He has been consistent in his support for redistributive, worker-centered social-welfare states, and consistent in his opposition to totalitarianism and autocracy and state violence.

The guy has always been clear that he wants the United States to become more like Denmark, not Cuba. Millions of young people have joined him in thinking that sounds like a good idea. A recent poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation showed that 36 percent of Millennials have a favorable opinion of communism, as do a quarter of Gen Zers. Roughly half of the members of those two generations have a favorable view of socialism and thinks the government should act as an employer of last resort.

In contrast, Baby Boomers and members of the Greatest Generation have deeply unfavorable views of all these ideologies or ideas—again, associating communism and socialism with horrific atrocities and autocratic states. Such countries can be classified as communist because in all of them, the central government controls all aspects of the economic and political system.

But none of them have achieved the elimination of personal property, money or class systems that the communist ideology requires. Likewise, no country in history has achieved a state of pure socialism. Even countries that are considered by some people to be socialist states, like Norway, Sweden and Denmark, have successful capitalist sectors and follow policies that are largely aligned with social democracy.

Many European and Latin American countries have adopted socialist programs such as free college tuition, universal health care and subsidized child care and even elected socialist leaders, with varying levels of success. In the United States, socialism has not historically enjoyed as much success as a political movement.

Its peak came in , when Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs won 6 percent of the vote. But at the same time, U. Democratic socialism, a growing U. Like communists, democratic socialists believe workers should control the bulk of the means of production, and not be subjected to the will of the free market and the capitalist classes. National Geographic Society. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher.

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Industrialization ushered much of the world into the modern era, revamping patterns of human settlement, labor, and family life. The Progressives were mostly upper and middle-class Americans who looked at both the problems of society and the rising popularity of violent Socialist ideology, and began to work both privately and through the government to address the problems.

They instituted reforms that regulated working hours, child labor, protected consumers, and broke the power of monopolies. Even the farthest members of the standard Indianleft cannot be called Socialist because they do not wish for a violent overthrow of the capitalist system , they simply believe in the power of the government to counteract the power of business and improve the lives of lower-class countrymen.

Marxism contends that once a concerted assault is launched on private ownership, the private owners will be forced to hand over their entire capital, agricultural land, industries and all the means of exchange to the state.

Once the entire capital, production, and exchange come into the hands of the State, private ownership will be eliminated automatically. The Communists accused Dr. Ambedkar, who said that the Communist Manifesto is a must-read for the laboring classes, of weakening their movement, it only shows that they did not deem it necessary to even read Ambedkar.

It is due to this attitude that the Communist movement has failed to strike roots in the country. Ambedkar insisted on the annihilation of caste, without which, neither classes could come into existence nor caste struggle ensues.

Had Karl Marx been born in India and had written his famous treatise Das Capital sitting in India, he would have had to write it in an entirely different fashion. Communism is the theory of the emancipation of the proletariat.

If the proletariat is defined as a class that earns its living only through the sweat of its brow and not from profit accruing from accumulated capital, the lowered castes in India are definitely the proletariat. The Indian proletariat, ie the poor, laboring class, is born of the Varna system. The proletariat came into existence in India with the Varna system.

It is not the product of any industrial revolution. It is a class that is proletariat by birth, which is lowered-caste by birth, in other words, a slave by birth. The new social system envisaged by Marxism wants an end to private ownership of industry. It wants to build a society where the means of production are owned and employed by society as a whole and the fruits of labor are distributed among or shared by all with their consent.

Here, the history and concept of private ownership is quite different from how Marx and Engels saw them.