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Referring to this topic, covered in Political World Sciences 

From: "Carol Ebbert"  
 To: [email protected]
 Subject: Re: Plato, Marx and Engels
 
Well, I can do Marx, a three of the books of the republic, but I have never heard of Stepp Wolf. When Marx was writing the Communist Manifesto, there were really two classes in the world. The upper class and the lower
class. There really was no middle class (well, some clerks and people like that, but they really didn't earn much more than the lower class). Things for the lower class was pretty scary. Like 14 hour work days, only one break for lunch, etc.
Workers had no rights, pay was not a living wage, barely a starvation wage. Everyone in a family had to work to make enough money to eat, but they didn't eat well. It was like that in every developed nation. 
Marx was a member of the intelligensia, he was really upper class, but didn't like what was going on, so he wrote against it. He felt that there had to be a better system than un-checked capitalism (though it really wasn't un-checked. There were laws, like tariffs, that benefitted the business owners, but none that benefitted the workers. Real capitalism means no laws
about anything that deals with business.) Marx felt that the lower classes in the developed countries would eventually fight for their rights and overthrow the upper
class. They eventually did, but not by forming communism, by reforming capitalism through democracy. 
Marx felt that in order to achieve communism there would have to be a temporary dicatatorship that would stamp out the upper
classes, put everything in the hands of the workers, and distribute the fruit of the worker's labor equally among all workers and thier families. 
In a way, this is similar to tribal groups that communally share all that they get. 
Marx also felt that religion was the opiate of the masses. Religion was used to keep the lower class in their place, and it really was. Christianity teaches that if you suffer in this life, the next life will be wonderful. It teaches that less is better. That poverty is good, and riches sin. A lot of its messages were aimed at keeping the poor happy, in when Marx was
writing, those messages were emphasized. 

When Russia became communist, though, it did not exactly fit into the idea that Marx had come up with for a country to go communist. It was not really a worker's rebelion, but really the intelligensia led it. it was not an industrialized nation.It had not gone through the period of democracy Marx felt a country needed to go through. 

That's about all I can remember about the Manifesto. I read it two years ago.