The Cold War And Communism

While global inequality may be setting the stage for the international revolution that Marx idealized in modern society; we can look at the past century to help explain the global battle between Marxist communism and capitalism. During the better part of the twentieth century, the Communist Soviet Union battled American Capitalism in the Cold War. The Cold War was a battle between ideologies and economic systems and demonstrated the ability of both capitalism and communism to spread around the world. The beginning of the conflict was the result of the end of the previous conflict, World War Two. After the Second World War there was a lot of instability in the world caused by a great war between world powers. The war caused the destruction

GATT was a global treaty which reduced tariffs between nations and substantially increased the amount of trade in the world. The United States also ushered in policies like the Marshall Plan to help rebuild the mostly capitalist Western Europe. However, the Soviet Union responded by creating the Warsaw Pact. Additionally, the Soviets built up their sphere of influence and promoted communism around the world. At one point there was twenty-four Marxist communist countries in the world. Though, despite some success, the Soviet Union eventually collapsed. The ability of capitalist nations to generate wealth coupled by the benefits of trade damaged the ability of communism to spread. The Soviet Union’s reliance on self-sufficiency became more difficult to achieve as capitalist consumer goods became more popular. In the end Marx’s Global Revolution failed to materialized and was instead unraveling. With the collapse of the Soviet Union came the collapse of the Soviet sphere. Today, only four Marxist Communist countries remain. In the time since, the world has increasingly

Eventually, in 1995, GATT was replaced by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The World Trade Organization is a global governing body that has powers that go far beyond GATT in promoting international trade. The WTO is an organization I believe Marx would identify has an arm of the bourgeoisie and capitalism. Marx would shake his head because today nearly every nation in the world belongs to the WTO including Russia and China. As explained earlier, Karl Marx believed in free trade, but as I see it, the WTO runs diametrically opposed to his view on free trade. The WTO is an organization created largely by the capitalist countries to facilitate capitalism around the world. Now it is nearly impossible for a nation to totally reject capitalism unless it wants to wind up like North