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Sociological Imagination: Western’s Undergraduate Sociology Student Journal

Article Title

Principles of Communism as a Basis for Social Democracy

Abstract

This paper is a summary of Marx and Engels’s sociology of class relations analysed against contemporary capitalist “social” democracies and current class issues such as the Occupy Movement. The paper references the original works of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels and their analysis of the relationship between exploitive class systems and the rise of capitalism following the industrial revolution. This paper then examines Marx and Engels’ criticisms of capitalism and compares them to contemporary capitalist democracy and contemporary social issues in an attempt to understand and explain the usefulness of Communist theory in predicting and explain changes in social formation. The paper finds that Marxist concept of proletarian revolution is left unrealized due to a shift in many capitalist democracies towards socialism. Marx and Engels’ critique of capitalism’s exploitation of the working class and their proposed solution, Communism, has been used to the opposite effect of what they intended. Individuals in Western society who are not members of the ruling class (the so-called 99% defined by the “Occupy” Movement) have been appeased with social policies such that they are totally indoctrinated into a proletariat that does not recognize their class position. The classical version of Communism imagined by Marx and Engels may not be the next evolutionary step in man’s social evolution but the principles upon which their plan for society was based have and will continue to be implemented into contemporary Capitalist democratic systems resulting in a more moral society just as Marx and Engels dreamed.

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