This Essay was posted on 3/15/2026.
American education during the Cold War gave me many misconceptions about Communism and Capitalism. One was evil. One was not. One was autocratic. One was not. After I read the story of Karl Marx and his wife Jenny in the book Love and Capital by Mary Gabriel, I knew that I needed a better understanding of Communism as well as Capitalism. It turns out that the two are not evil nor particularly good, and they are not specifically autocratic nor democratic. They are simply socio-economic systems that are used and misused by mankind.
We think we know what Capitalism is. You can own a business and hire workers to produce your product that can be sold at a profit. Less understood is the relationship between the business owner and the workers. Under that relationship, lower wages to the workers means more profit. The mistreatment of workers by business owners in the 1840’s was a driving force for the idea of Communism.
Karl Marx identifies the distinctly unfair relationship between business owners and workers and proposes a new Communist economic system that will address the problem. Marx proposes that business ownership be abolished, the obsolescence of profit, and that workers manage production. Ideally, the end result would be, according to Marx, a society with no class distinction based on wealth or ownership.
Capitalism and the business owner-worker relationship is a byproduct of the Industrial Age that evolved from a class oriented feudal system with serfs and land-owning nobles. Instead of blood, the Capitalist class structure is based on wealth and ownership. Communism, on the surface, is a modern answer to the Capitalistic class structure, but is Communism really modern, and is it a true alternative? And does Communism solve the class problem? The answers to these questions are not simple.
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