roubles are based on problems it found, or created, during the years it operated under socialism. This theory, which proposes equality and the means of achieving it, has been scorned by the Western world. One must wonder why such a grand conception has failed. A. Karl Marx and the Communist ManifestoBy far, the most important document in the development of socialism was The CommunistManifesto, written by Karl Marx and Frederik Engels in 1848. (Berki) This document waspublished as a reply to politicians who would accuse their opponents of being Communist for the sake of scaring the public. (Marx) Marx's Manifesto was the driving force behind socialism and Communism in Russia. In it, he described the fall of capitalism at the hands of the working classes. (Berki) The following paragraphs are excerpts from that work. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-masters and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. (Marx) "Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat.... The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. (Marx) "Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replace...
