These early writings of Marx give insight into the Philosophy of Communism.

For Marx, the enemy of being is having. Private property, not the land you own… ANYTHING that you might own, is the enemy of mankind, and the cause of his alienation. Because the ability to own things leads inevitably to self-centeredness and greed.

In Marx’s critique, private property has led to the alienation of man from his labor, and the only way forward is communism- the abolition of private property leading to the free availability of nature to all.

If this can be brought about, man will attain to his true self- ‘species man’- the man who recognizes his place not merely as an individual, one of which make up society, but as an integrated part of mankind.  

This lovely vision will take place in two stages: the first will be what he calls crude communism- which is essentially the idea of private property, but extended to all- everyone owns everything. The enforcement of this will take the power of the state. Eventually, this will give way to ‘communism as socialism coinciding with humaneness’, the state in which humans all voluntarily get along in their universal recognition of their interconnectedness.

These two stages may be why current communists say “communism has never really been tried"….

Perhaps the better way to look at it would be: Communism never got past the failures of its first stage.

Marx has some reasonable critiques of the capitalist society he saw, and some of his critiques are things that many Christians would probably agree with: the corrupting effect of money, for one.

But some of his critiques fall flat for a few reasons:

1) he often takes a principle of capitalism, then expands it out in the worst case scenario, and claims that this is the inevitable effect of the causes.  

2) He reads capitalist writings as if they are talking about humans in their fullness. For example, those writers were writing about workers, as workers in an economic system. When they say labor is this or labor is that, or here is the value of labor, I believe they are speaking purely in terms of their economic role. Marx reads them and understands them as speaking of humans as nothing but brute labor to be used up.  

As to 1), clearly Marx was wrong, because things didn’t play out as he thought. Part of the problem is that he was thinking abstractly, and not considering the complex system as a whole. With every move, there is an adjustment, often mitigating, or countering, the effects of the move. So when Marx describes some inevitable descent into hell, he never seems to consider what might rise up to counter that. Granting, no one is capable of understanding the totality of complex systems, but Marx certainly blew it in this regard.

As to 2) because Marx is thinking in totalitarian terms of rewiring humanity, he ascribes that same totalitarian picture to capitalism. But capitalism is meant to describe an economic system alone, not an entire way of life. Workers could, and did, and still do, have lives and fulfillment outside of work.

Marx was trying to outline a way to radically revise human nature. That’s simply not possible. Smith tried to take reality, and find a way to get the most out of it. Capitalism will have its problems. Communism was an unmitigated disaster, and one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated on humanity… all in the name of the purest motives.