Welcome to a lesson on choconism, the study of economic and political system through the consumption of Hershey Kisses. This week in history class we got a sweet taste of capitalism, socialism, and communism through the perspectives of Karl Marx and Adam Smith's theories.
My parents love talking "all things politically" and I never understood the term capitalism and socialism and communism. Well of course I thought communism means a community government, and socialism was a government which included a lot of social people, and capitalism was the rest of society, because I couldn't figure it out. But a couple days ago, I realized what they meant, through a little gamble with chocolate and rock, paper, scissors.
When my history teacher brought in a huge bag of Hershey Kisses, our whole class leapt in joy, and the excitement just increased when she started distributing it to class. Two chocolates for twenty four kids and eight chocolates for the remaining two. "Wait what!? Is Mrs. Gallagher showing favoritism??" Obviously us twenty four students were enraged at the other two kids who were sitting gleaming at their desks. After being instructed not to eat the chocolates (yes, it was sad), my history teacher told us that we could earn chocolates by beating other kids through a simple game of rock, paper, scissors; if you lose you have to give on up and if you win you earn one, and when you are left with zero you have sit down. Okay, so my stomach grumbled with joy, until I got out after five games! Slowly the seats were getting filled, and there were only five to six kids playing, with almost ten pieces (the two "favorited" kids were left with none). Once, everyone was settled, more than half of the class had no chocolates, while a few had a lot. Then comes our awesome government, my history teacher, and collects the chocolate of the others and redistributes it equally, two for everyone. Of course, the majority of the class was happy, except for the fact that our government was eating the bag of chocolates in front of us. She gave us a choice of playing, but almost everyone refused to play, and were happy with the equal amount of Kisses we had; so my teacher didn't have to supervise the candy distribution. And, finally, after the struggle, my class reached the economical standard of communism.
Karl Marx, a German socialist, authored the Communist Manifesto, which introduces his three step process to achieve communism. Marx's theory of communism starts with capitalism, with everyone having some kind of private ownership of industry. People will then have a freedom of competition, allowing people to earn or lose money, which eventually resulted in class struggle and revolts from the proletariat (poor class). Marx then said, in lever to make things more fair, people would create a government system of socialism. The goal is to bring economic equality, so there will be a government ownership of industry, therefore leading in a classless society. Finally, Marx claims that the majority of people would not accept the possibility of sharp divisions between rich and poor any longer. By any means necessary, even violence, they would create communism, where the goal of a classless society is set. Eventually, this system will result in no government to distribute and supervise society. Marx thought if everyone was in the same rank as everyone else, then the poor would benefit, and be in a better position than they were before.(a quick video bio of Marx is below)
Adam Smith, a British social philosopher, published his theory on capitalism in his Invisible Hand. (yes, it does sounds shady) Smith introduced the ‘invisible hand’ theory that was proved to be more fair than Marx’s communism ideas. He said that if the government leaves private companies alone and allow them to buy and trade on their own, they will operate based on their own self interest . Over a period of time, after competing with others, the good businesses, that don't cheat customers and charge reasonably, will succeed and the bad businesses will fail; this way the economy will grow on it's own. The only downfall is that this process takes a long time, and while the economy to figure everything out there will be a lot of “stalling” and time wasted. So in order to speed things up, the government will be put to charge to avoid the stalls. The rich preferred this system because they got a choice to go into business or not. Also benefited by this process is the poor, who would be receiving higher quality products for less price. They would eventually be able to afford them and be part of the market. This theory is quite difficult to grasp, so our class watched two videos describing Smith’s motivation and the process itself (videos are below)
I prefer Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, since all the ranks in the social class are benefiting from it, while being supervised by a sturdy government, who will lead them on. The only problem to this method is the long time it takes for a country to become wealthy. I feel its quite impossible for a country to survive without a government since things could get out of hand. Marx’s theories on communism calls for a recipe of slight violence and disaster. Imagine if the “used-to-be” rich protested against the majority “poor class” for their money back. The results would not be great. Capitalism gives everyone a fair opportunity even if there are social classes, and those who have the capability of achieving success, will earn it fairly.
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