Having been assigned to read The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & watch Les Miserables based off the book by Victor Hugo, we have had to begin thinking about which serves society better: the individual or the collective. I think both of these ideas can have positive effects stem from them; it really depends on the society in question & the time in which we're looking at.
Sure, from a distance communism seems like the perfect way to structure a society. Everyone is equal, everything is distributed evenly & all equally provide what is to be handed out. Equality is key. In a democracy today many of believe that still; the only way to be truly free is to be equal. When we begin to look at empirical evidence of Marxist ideas we see that it doesn't pan out exactly how it's promised. The actual concept just doesn't work in reality & this is a problem. This is the same conundrum for what Marx is trying to portray about the collective society; in theory it makes perfect sense, in actuality it is a failure.
Marx believes that people are innately hopeless; in order for a revolution to occur, society must lose all hope in order to rise up against those that are oppressing them. Putting myself in those shoes leaves me confused. If a people were being repressed & had no hope for the future why would they bother trying to change anything about it? You must have hope for change, good or bad, in order to want to try to affect the outcome. This is exactly what Hugo is trying to get across. We are all individuals, and as individuals we never lose hope. When we add all of these individuals together into a single society we get a revolution of hope & change. I think Hugo was definitely on the right path with this one. But who knows, those Marxists could be right in the future, but I have yet to see it come to pass.
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