1.

Describe the political and economic philosophy underlying the attempts to create a new
socialist society and economy? What were the moral justifications for a socialist revolution?
What was the idea of man in the communist thinking?

the political philosophy underlying the attempts to create a new socialist society was a
devaluation of the concept of the king, or the oligarch.
the new supreme entity became the “all” whose needs were adjudicated by the “state.”
the socialist economy would derive from the economic philosophy of moderation in all thing on
a needs-basis. no one would have too much and labor-extraction would be levied based on the
abilities of the subject/worker.
in its most simple reduction, the moral justification for a socialist revolution, would be the greater
good of many.

the idea of man in the communist way of thinking might be conceived in many ways.
the communist person as a sub-entity of the state, was then subservient to the needs of the
state and the mechanism of participation would lie in the working transaction.

as marx, the political philosopher, engaged with the more mathematically minded engels,
they were then to derive easy explanations for the transitions occurring through the industrial
revolutions.
the positing of the terms “labor” and “value” and “capital” hold place and meaning for the
documents in which they are inscribed.

marx himself wrote in the face of horrific penury and political oppression which cast he and
his poor family adrift, dependent on the behest of engels. marx’s startling poetic capacity
personified the “spectre” and might be interpreted infinite ways.

the core critical data marx provided was about labor sales. in the sense that the laborer sells
his work at a price. the labor itself has a profitability pertinent to the larger transactions at play-
--the per item profit margin of the goods produced---for example. as workers were often paid
on an hourly basis, the remaining hours of their work day were sheerly devoted to raising profit
revenue for their employer, or reinvestment capital and infrastructure support.

the socialist revolution then was pioneered on the moral foundation of disrupting this profit
mechanism geering profitability to the capitalist, and keeping the worker engaged at a
subsistence level. the socialist revolution would free the worker to be a part of the collective
ownership as property notions became dissolved in a communal redistribution.

the moral integrity of the socialist revolution held fantastic room for optimisms towards freeing
the worker from senseless and often inhumane toil.

the upsetting of the old ways of aristocracy provided a way for more equitable redistribution of
wealth. the capitalists, who had essentially mechanized feudalistic attitudes, would then fall
away.

the progression through capitalism, as one of marx’s evolutionary stages, might meet with
acceleration, for they who had never experienced capitalism or late-stage capitalism.
communism, was then conjectured to be the final state of man, the perfection of a system,
which gave equity to all subjects, and which the state operated with the ease of a machine.

the rhetoric of revolution remained a constant refrain despite the successive corruptions which
occurred. the grotesque human rights violation under stalin were not perceived as predictable,
although a more humanistic or psychological evaluation could see huge moral vulnerabilities
available in any system where human beings engage.

as the idea of man became that which is not allowed to speak, that which had its genesis in
radical critique could bear no more critique, man was then then infinitely silence-able non-entity,
or a useful cog in a machine, merely.