" (Marx & Engles, "The Communist Manifesto," Chapter 2) the little pin-maker is long sense dead, suggestted the authors of the "Manifesto." The little peasant or artisan has been replaced by the pin factory owner, and there is no nobility to the wage slavery of the worker to the factory. Later on, in Captial, rather than the more vehement rhetoric of the politically agitating "Manifesto," Marx was to more cautiously suggest a controlled, rather than completely communal marketplace where the surplus-value "realized by the sale of a certain commodity appears to the capitalist as an excess of its selling price over its value," should be contained and better allocated to the worker rather than through pure privatization. (Marx, Capital, Volume III, Part 1, Chapter 1) but the more politically incendiary words of Marx and Engels regarding communal ownership are what are remembered best by history, much like Adam Smith's notion of an invisible capitalist hand that sets...

Although neither concept perfectly explain the inequities or benefits of communal or capitalist economies, these concepts remain the schematic brush by which Marxism and Capitalism are understood.
Works Cited

Marx, Karl. "The German Ideology." 1845. Marx Engels Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a3

Marx, Karl & Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. Reprinted Signet Classics, 1998 and on Marx Engels Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

Marx, Karl. Capital. Originally published 1867. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling -- edited by Frederick Engels. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Originally published 1776. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., ed. Edwin Cannan, 1904. Fifth edition. Reprinted in Bantam Classics Edition, 2000.