Labors and workers demonstrations for a decent wage still have continued until today. They feel that they have been paid inadequate amount of money. On the other hand, the owners of the company where they work are getting richer.
Overpopulation problem also makes the workforce become more abundant, this of course leads to the decreasing wage level and making the living costs rising.
The increasing number of the unemployment rate is also inevitable due to the limited absorption of labor. Even though a worker has qualified skills, good work experience, and higher education, it wouldn't help at all when they got laid off.
Some economists have contended that the condition of full-employment is almost impossible so that the unemployment will always take place. Consequently, there are vast swaths of workers who usually do not own the means of production, are always prone to falling below the poverty line.
Furthermore, the development of technology has also reduced the demand for labor, so that the unemployment rate have been expected to continue to rise. The rising number of unemployment would definitely lead to the rising economic inequality.
This condition had been predicted in the 19th century by Karl Marx. He strongly believed that history is always filled with struggles of economic classes between the owners of capital or the bourgeoisie and the workers or the proletariat.
Causes of the Creation of Communism
Karl Marx argued that capitalism would always be detrimental to the proletariat, he further argued that the bourgeoisie were always less willing to pay a decent wage to their workers, beside that they would always take more profits generated from the surplus-value that created by its workers. Consequently, the workers would always stay poor.
Therefore, Marx was intending to create a classless society in which the means of production or capital to have been owned communally by all groups of people so that there would be no more oppression to the proletariat. As a result, they all can live in prosperity.
Firstly, you need to understand that the means of production is also referred to as capital stock or assets. Factories, shops, stock portfolios and even a rented house are also the means of production. In essence, anything that generates passive income for the owner of the capital is often referred to as the means of production.
Capitalism was also born from an obsolete traditional economic system which only had benefited kings and aristocrats. Marx had argued that one day capitalism would have collapsed and evolving again because this ideology was also born to replace the previous obsolete ideology, so that one day capitalism would be likely to evolve again, probably towards communism or socialism.
In capitalism, almost every worker, even a skilled worker, is susceptible to fall below the poverty line. It is really difficult for them to accumulate capital to buy the means of production. Their low wages and rising cost of living have discouraged their hope. As a result, when they lost their jobs they also lost income.
Therefore, Marx was proposing that the transition of society from capitalist to communism should be occuring soon. In communism, the ownership of the factors of production is distributed equally among all levels of society, this is also widely known as from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. In 1848, Marx and Engels eventually published the Communist Manifesto. The book's first sentence said: "Ghosts were looming over Europe." This terrifying phrase was intended to have frightened the bourgeoisie.
When the ownership of the factors of production is distributed equally, workers who lost their jobs could still enjoy the results of production, so they could still live adequately.
In fact, today's world population have been increasing drastically and majority of them are proletarians who have no factors of production. As a result, many of those who have only relied on monthly wages, will find it difficult to get out of poverty.
To fix the worsening economic inequality, several countries, especially in Western Europe and Scandinavia, have begun to implement socialist economies or also widely known as the welfare state. This modern concept is more appropriate to be applied today, because socialism also upholds democracy and freedom for its people. Compared to communism, which is usually run in authoritarianism.
In socialist countries, economic wealth is likely to be more equally distributed among all groups of people. Equal economic rights are also provided to all levels of society. Vast numbers of government programs are run to benefit low income workers. People in socialist countries have little incentive to accumulate large amount of wealth because their health and pensions are guaranteed by the state.
As a result, the country's total wealth is more equally distributed, especially in Scandinavia (10% of the rich owns 65% of the country's total wealth) compared to the more capitalist USA (1% of the rich owns 40% of the country's total wealth).
Henceforth, when would possibly majority of countries implement welfare state?
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