Chocunism- The Study of Marx and Smith By Eating Chocolate

Early on a Monday morning, 25 sleepy teenagers walked into Honors History 10 and immediately perked up at the smell of Hershey chocolate.  Our eyes all widened as Mrs. Gallagher dropped 8 chocolate kisses on the first student’s desk and announced that we would get to eat our share at the end of the class. But when she proceeded to give only 2 kisses to the rest of us, cries rang out. “Why does Brian get more?” shouted one student. “Yeah, that’s no fair!” backed up the rest of the class. It was here that Mrs. Gallagher jumped in and explained that we would be acting out Karl Marx’s Theory of Communism by using chocolate as “money”, and playing games of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ to mimic trade and commerce.

Karl Marx and Adam Smith were both philosophers in the late 1700s who saw the sharp divide between Great Britain’s rich and poor. Each came up with a different theory on how the poor could improve their wealth and general living. By progressing from capitalism, to socialism, to communism, our class reenacted Karl Marx's ideal theory of communism. Marx saw that when a country practices capitalism, giving citizens the right to private ownership of industry and competition, major class struggle develops. Most people end up dirt poor, like the “chocolate-less”, and only a few people end up fifthly rich. According to Marx’s theory, eventually the lower classes of a country will revolt and adopt the policy of socialism. In socialism, a country’s government will collect and redistribute goods to everyone equally, just like Ms. Gallagher eventually did in class. This creates a classless society where the majority doesn’t want to risk their chances of becoming poor again, and so the country eventually becomes communist. At this point, Marx says that government is no longer necessary because the classless society will willingly share everything in order to maintain equality. But Marx wasn't the only philosopher with a theory to help the poor. A few years before him, Adam Smith came up with the "Invisible Hand". This theory said that if citizens of a country are left alone to trade and compete, they will operate based on their own self-interest, causing fair businesses to succeed and the rest to fail. Business owners will realize that it is necessary to pay their employees higher wages so that they can afford to become customers in turn. Although this will take a LONG time and cause suffering along the way, the theory states that eventually the economy will grow on its own so that there is no sharp divide between rich and poor. Both Marx and Smith saw the harsh difference between the few rich people in Europe during the late 1700s, and the thousands of poor, hungry, poverty stricken people. Each philosopher devised a theory that he believed would best help the poor to eventually emerge from poverty.

 

For more on Marx and his Theory of Communism, check out BIO's video on YouTube!

 

 

For a brief overview of Smith's "Invisible Hand", watch this video clip by ouLearn on YouTube!

 

After reenacting Marx’s theory and learning about Smith’s, I feel torn when asked to choose which one best solves the problem of widespread poverty. Both theories sound good on paper, but neither has ever been known to work or occur in their pure form, so it’s hard to say if either will ever be successful. Marx’s theory results in communism, which has been practiced in countries like China and Russia. Although all classes are equal, the people who inhabit these countries are said to live very dreary and unhopeful lives because everyone is “the same”. Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory also has its downfalls. Although the end result sounds more ideal than communism, it takes a very long period of struggle for his theory to be complete. Both Marx’s and Smith’s ideas aren’t perfect, and I feel like a better alternative is to combine the two. The invisible hand will take too long to work itself out, but its result is ideal. Perhaps some of Marx’s ideas, like a government to give guidance and support to the general population, could be incorporated to speed up the process. Marx and Smith both had good ideas for helping lower classes rise out of poverty, and by combining and tweaking them, they could work in reality.