Question

The excerpt below is from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Which political leader ascribed most closely to their vision for society?

“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” 1

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Project Gutenberg eBook 61, January 25, 2005), accessed September 11, 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61/61.txt.

A. Nelson Mandela during the African independence movements

B. Mohandas Gandhi during India’s fight for independence

C. Vladimir Lenin during the Russian Revolution

D. Kwame Nkrumah during Ghana’s nonviolent political revolution

Answer 1

the answer would be C

Answer 2

Answer: C. Vladimir Lenin during the Russian Revolution

Explanation: One of the greatest ideological followers of Marx and Engels was definitely Lenin. All the other three political leaders in the fight for justice, independence and greater equality used non-violent methods of struggle, but although there was a violence somewhere and somehow, these leaders proclaimed non-violence. On the other hand, Lenin fully followed the teachings of Marx and Engels, and what was written in the Communist Manifesto, that the armed struggle was completely permissible and legitimate in the class struggle, even necessary in the Revolution to achieve a classless society. As such, the bourgeois class is marked as the cause of all division, antagonism and the exploitation of other classes, and therefore, at all costs, even at the cost of armed conflict, should be overthrown and abolished.