Communism and capitalism, the totally opposite systems, always fight, although the capitalism is a bit older than the communism. The most important ones of these fights date back to the Cold War. This war was between the countries of Warsaw Pact and the ones of NATO(North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Actually, the primary participants’ military forces never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, a nuclear arms race, espionage, proxy wars, propaganda, and technological competition, such as Space Race. All right, what are the differences between these two systems? They can be contrasted out in terms of the viewpoints about ecenomy and the social life.
The viewpoints of these systems about the economy are totally different. The capitalist system uses the opinions of liberal economy policy. The most important person about this policy was Adam Smith. In his book “ The Wealth of Nations”, he expressed that the free market, while appearing chaotic and unrestained, was actually guided to produce the right amount and variety of goods by so-called “ invisible hand”. Smith made his laws about the economic system like the natural laws. According to him, the individuals by pursuing their own interest frequently promote the society more effectually than when they intend to promote it. This was the brief explanation of the “ invisible hand” term and similar to food chains in an ecosystem. In free market system, individuals join the ecenomy as consumers, laborers, and investors. For example, as consumers, individuals influence production patterns through their purchase decisions, as producers they will change production in order to produce what is most profitable. As laborers, individuals may decide which jobs to prepare for and in which markets to look for work. As investors, they decide how much of their income to save and how to invest their savings. These savings provide much of the money that businesses need to grow. All of these forms “ supply-demand” and “ competition” parts of the capitalist eceonomy. On the other hand, the communism system was set up on the Marxism ideology. Marx gave the importance to the labor and labor power. He named people who must sell their labor power as “ proleterians” and ones who buy the labor power as “ capitalists”. He observed that in practice every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference “ surplus value” and argued that this had its source in surplus labor, the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce. At the same time, this value was the capitalist’s profit. In fact, this value was created by the proleterian’s labor-power. Therefore it should belong to the laborer. Communism sort out this problem and suggests that people earn proportionally to their labor-power. It is totally against the individuals’ competition. On the contrary, it encourages the collectivism of labor. For instance, a professor can work as a construction worker for the building necessity of the country in order to shorten the building time. After Long Walk of Mao in 1949, China became an communist country. However China’s communism was different from the others’. China wasn’t a country of Cold War and Maoism, Far East version of Marxism-Leninism, was used in this country. In addition to the laborer, agriculture and villagers are given great importance by Mao because the life in China was associated with the soil. As it is said in the journal “ New China and the Old” : “ What China is able to do on top of that, which other capitalist countries cannot, is use the power of the State plan large projects and harness both private and public companies to achieve them…”, today China uses the power of seeming communism to become big capitalist. Their actual political system is now capitalism.
In addition to viewpoints about economy, their perspectives about social life are totally different. The capitalism encourages the individualism. Competition is the main element of individualism. Each individual must be better than the others to earn his life as if he were an animal trying to survive in the wild nature. This leads bad emotions to spread out in the society, such as mistrust, outrage , and discrimination. Another result of capitalism is consumerism. In capitalism, the social life is formed with respect to the principles of “ Consume-Obey-Die”. People don’t have enough time to think, and examine their lives. They are encouraged to consume without thinking what will happen as a result of their actions. This cause people become alienated from production. In other words, this led people to become unaware the things which they produce, why they produce these and the results of their actions. On the other hand, as it is said in the journal “ Cuba, change is in the air”: “ It’s like young people here are in a cocoon, preparing and preparing themselves until they can one day break free and fly away.”, there is a closed social structure life in the communist countries. In fact, this is not the real property of communism. The reason for this is the real communism will not exist unless the borders of countries are removed. The system which now exists in the communist countries is not real communism, it is the dictatorship of proleteriat. Collectivism is also another content of communism. Communism encourages collectivism against the individualism. In communism, there is no family life because it is viewed as the rest of feudalism. People live in the units named as commune. They eat food at the refectories and sleep in the dormitories.
To sum up, communism and capitalism have some problems. The principles of capitalism is against the humanity which is formed by the things which distinguish a human from an animal. Capitalism leads to an idea which is that all the actions done in order to get money can be acceptable. Imperialism, the fundamental necessity to maintain capitalism, is the biggest enemy of the humanity. World War 1, the war in Iraq, and in Palestine and terrorism in Turkey are some examples of violonce created by imperialism. On the other hand, the viewpoint of communism about the family life is wrong. This also causes big restriction in human life. In the near future, there will be a system which is composite of capitalism and communism. In this system, the difference between the earnings of people will be very small , and there will be family life not communes but there will be collectivism of labor. Imperialism will be no longer valid. The most important thing is that the children won’t be killed in order to make profit.