as diplomatic relations between cuba and theunited states improve, we wanted to look at the political philosophy behind the long embargoednation. cuba is one of the last communist dictatorships left in the world, and sinceextreme anti-communist sentiments in the mid 20th century, the philosophy has been a regularfixture in political discussions. so we wanted to know, what exactly is communism? well, there are a number of overlapping philosophiesand socioeconomic systems that can be described as communist in nature. but in the most basicsense, communism is when all manufacturing, or “means of production†are equally ownedby all the members of a state. the intended result is to eliminate the capitalist-inspiredclass system where one class does all the
work and the other gets all the money. although similar ideas have existed both naturallyand intentionally since the dawn of time, the most common form of communism comes fromthe work of german philosophers karl marx and friedrich engels, in what is today knownas “marxismâ€. in particular, marxism is focused on the exploitation of the worker.it’s based on the idea that any profit generated by the worker but instead goes to the businessowner, is a form of inequality and should be abolished. in recent history, several countries includingthe ussr, china, vietnam and cuba have attempted to institute their own versions of communism.however all can be said to be predominantly
socialist, and not communist. the biggestdifference between the two is that socialism says that all workers should get an equalshare in profit and property, while communism says that there shouldn’t be money or ownershipin general, and everyone should get as much as they need, and work as much as they can.unfortunately, attempts to achieve this political philosophy have led to lower standards ofliving, government corruption, and in the case of the ussr, total collapse and failure. a number of reasons have been put forth asto why communism hasn’t worked out historically. but the strongest criticism of the philosophyis that communism removes the incentive for people to work harder than they absolutelyhave to. it also leads to resentment of those
who work less hard but receive the same. ingeneral, communism is described as being great in theory, while disastrous in practice. thestate of the world seems to agree with that assessment. if you’d like to learn more about politicaltheory, make sure you check out these videos about libertarianism, and anarchy. make sureyou subscribe for more, and let us know what you’d like us to cover next on our facebookor twitter pages. there are links in the description!