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if they controlled the means of production and distribution could they es-
cape exploitation by the ruling class and manage the economy in their own
interest. That interest was expressed by the formula: “From each according
to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”2 Marx considered the virtue
of this formula so obvious that after the Communist party, exercising the
“dictatorship of the proletariat,” had converted the masses of all countries
to communism and eliminated the dangers of “capitalist encirclement,” all
would voluntarily follow the formula, coercion by central authority would
be unnecessary, the “state would wither away,” and communism would be-
come identical with anarchism. All men would live freely and peacefully
together like brothers.
Marx thought that this ideal would develop inevitably by “historical de-
terminism.” He accepted Hegel’s evolutionary theory that progress results
from a dialectic — a thesis generates an antithesis, conflict between them
results in a synthesis, which becomes a new thesis generating in turn its
own antithesis, and a higher synthesis, ad infinitum. Marx, however, applied
the dialectic, not to ideas, as did Hegel, but to economic systems, the ma-
terial factors of production, thus creating “dialectical materialism.” The
proletariat, convinced by the “Communist Manifesto” of Marx and Engels
(1848), would recognize their class conflict with the ruling, property-own-
ing bourgeoisie, and would espouse socialism as the antithesis of capitalism.
As capitalism undermined itself by exploiting and empoverishing the work-
ers (thus eliminating its market and destroying the society), the Communist
party would take possession of productive property and establish a final
synthesis in a communist society.
Marx considered this process inevitable as had been the bourgeoisie’s
recognition of their class conflict with the land-owning aristocracy, the en-
suing conflict between feudalism and capitalism, and the eventual achieve-
ment of a synthesis in the nation-state controlled by the bourgeois capital-
ists.3 On the details of the process by which thesis and antithesis resulted in
a synthesis, Marx was not entirely clear. He called for violent revolution in
the Manifesto of 1848 but in some of his writings gave support to a more
evolutionary process utilizing education and propaganda. His successors
divided into the evolutionary socialists (represented by the German Social
Democrats and the British Labor Party) who thought that the parliamentary
process and social legislation would eventually establish socialism, and the
revolutionary Communists — the Bolshevists — led by Lenin, who wrote
on the strategy of revolution involving much violence.
Practical Communism. It is the revolutionary process of realizing com-
munism that has, as noted, aroused antagonism in conservative quarters.
There has been little hostility in the United States to evolutionary socialism.