Try to imagine what if in our world no one is poor and no one is rich? And why would everything won't be fair for people to live? Imagine if valuable things like land and factories belonged to each and everyone. And imagine this world where we live in which everyone is working so hard but not even one is paid. Why? So that everything would be free. These are some of the central ideas of a movement called communism that was invented by Karl Marx.
Karl Marx ideas of this movement of communism became famous in the early 1800's. There were a lot of big factories that were made and rising at that time. And a lot of workers working in factories gained low money or wages from their work. And in the meantime, factory owners were getting rich. This cause a lot workers to be angry.
There were two Germans who turned this anger into political movement and created a big impact on the society. They were Friedrich Engels, and of course Karl Marx. They written a book that was publish in 1848 called,
The Communist Manifesto where they written most of the goals of this movement.
Marx and Engels said that all through history, different classes called the proletariat (the working class) and the bourgeoisie (the owning class) had been at war.
The fighting classes of their time were the owners of businesses and the people who worked for them. He viewed the working class as the good guys because they suffered and sacrificed much of their time for their jobs to get paid, for them to be able to eat and live. And he viewed the owning class as the bad guys because they don't really care much about the workers. They just make them work a lot and sometimes they don't even pay them the exact amount of money. And the owning class just keeps getting richer.
So Marx and Engels called all the workers of the world to unite (workers of the world unite!), in which the workers themselves owned all business. They said that if workers were in charge, everybody would get what they needed to live a comfortable and good life. He also wrote this book called
Das Kapital. It is
were he expanded his explanations of these ideas.
And soon, communism spread throughout Europe where most of the communists in Russia conquered some neighboring countries, too. They called their new empire the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union for short. Joseph Stalin was the man who took control in the USSR. He used cruel force to make the Soviet Union into a communist country. He killed and murdered many people by torturing and putting them in prison. He also made a country where everyone worked for the government. And this government made most of the control and decisions for the people.
Around World War II, the Soviet Union won. And it gained control over most of the countries in Eastern Europe when the war had ended in 1945. During this period in China, they had a communist leader that was rising in power. His name was Mao Zedong. He seized control of his country in 1949. China had a huge population and it became the biggest communist country of all. But communism lose its strength. That was the time when many non communist countries fought to keep communism from spreading because they were afraid that communism would keep expanding, which it will threat non communist countries.
The United States was the country that led the fight against communism, while the Soviet Union supported communist movements around the world.
These days and years of struggle and pain is known as the Cold War. This lasted for more than 40 years.
