The Communist Manifesto

By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

*Winner of the New York Times Book Covers of the Year, 2017*

'Workers of the world, Unite!'

The Communist Manifesto is arguably the world's most influential political manuscript. Surviving through countless decades of revolution and counter-revolution, Marx and Engels' incendiary treatise remains as essential today as it was in 1848: providing a framework for the people's liberation as they struggle against systems of extreme oppression across the globe.

Urgent and alarmingly well-written, The Communist Manifesto resonates beyond the confines of history and political theory - issuing a call-to-arms in the fight to end crisis-ridden capitalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786800268

Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, historian, political theorist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Born in Prussia, he received his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Jena in Germany and became an ardent follower of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx was already producing political and social philosophic works when he met Friedrich Engels in Paris in 1844. The two became lifelong colleagues and soon collaborated on "The Communist Manifesto," which they published in London in 1848. Expelled from Belgium and Germany, Marx moved to London in 1849 where he continued organizing workers and produced (among other works) the foundational political document Das Kapital. A hugely influential and important political philosopher and social theorist, Marx died stateless in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London.

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION: THE MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY FOR US

Jodi Dean

An idea whose time has come again

The importance of The Manifesto of the Communist Party nearly 200 years after it was written is surprising. It didn’t begin as a powerful statement by important people. Published in 1848, the Manifesto came about after a conspiratorial London group called the League of the Just contacted Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who had formed a network of Communist Correspondence Committees. The Central Committee of the League of the Just convinced Marx and Engels to join them in a new, more open, Communist League. The League would publish Marx’s and Engels’ critical communist ideas in a public statement of the League’s doctrine. Marx and Engels agreed, but Marx delayed finishing the text. The Central Committee had to harass him to get the manuscript, threatening to take ‘further measures’ against him if he didn’t deliver. Even then, the text didn’t carry out the assignment: Marx produced not a manifesto specific to the League but something more, a broader statement of how communists see the world. He even changed the name, delivering not The Communist Manifesto but The Manifesto of the Communist Party, a party which didn’t actually exist. In the first published version, neither the name of the group commissioning the manifesto nor those of its authors appeared on its cover. A manuscript handed in late, with no author, sponsored by no one, in the name of a non-existent party, changed the world.¹

The event that most profoundly registers this change is the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks, the more militant faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), led a movement of workers, soldiers and peasants in overthrowing tsarism and establishing the world’s first socialist workers’ republic. Just as the Manifesto predicted, the oppressed overthrew the oppressors. The class struggle at the basis of history once again resulted in the revolutionary reconstitution of society. The working class seized political power. After the revolution, the RSDLP changed its name to the Communist Party, occupying the space opened up by the Manifesto. This re-issue of The Communist Manifesto one hundred years after this revolutionary event pushes us to occupy this space again and take the perspective of revolution.

Is this a perspective we can take now? The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. For some, this means the time of revolution has passed. They claim that capitalism and democracy won. Capitalism and democracy, blended together and practically the same, proved themselves to be better, preferable, more efficient. Communism doesn’t work, we are told, handed the end of the USSR as evidence, as if history is always and forever the endless repetition of the same. Instead of revolution, we should direct our energies toward incremental changes. We should work for capitalism with a human face. We can’t change the world, but we can focus on ourselves, on the self-transformation that comes from self-work, self-love, self-care. We can even resist, carving out little moments of freedom when we spit on the burger before serving it with a smile. But, the defenders of the status quo insist, there is no need here and now for socialists, much less critical communists who ‘everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.’²

Don’t believe it. The uprisings, demonstrations, occupations and revolts of the first decades of the twenty-first century indicate that capitalist democracy claimed victory too soon. These days the failure of the system into which capitalism and democracy have converged is clear. Dramatic increases in economic inequality have convinced millions of people across the globe of the inability of capitalism to meet basic needs for food, housing, health, clean water and education. Planetary warming, mass extinctions, sea level rise and desertification point to the capitalist system’s threat to life on earth. Corporations, financial institutions and international organisations and agreements block the people from political arenas that claim to be democratic, pushing those who want to be heard onto online networks and into the streets. One hundred years since the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, political movements across the globe are taking the perspective of revolution. A new generation is returning to communism. It is an idea whose time has come again.

The communist revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaya said that for her husband, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, ‘the teachings of Marx were a guide to action’.³ Yet more than ten years before the Russian Revolution, the head of the German Social Democratic Party, Karl Kautsky, suggested that the Manifesto was obsolete. Kautsky admitted that the Manifesto’s principles and method were correct. Yet he used those principles and method to argue that much of the Manifesto’s description of bourgeois society no longer applied. The political and economic conditions of Western Europe pointed to evolution not revolution. Kautsky admitted things were different in Russia. For Russian socialists, the Manifesto remained ‘the best and most reliable guide’, ‘a compass upon the stormy ocean of the proletarian class struggle’.⁴

What about for us? Does it make sense to think that a text that the leading German socialist thought was outdated 60 years after its publication can provide us with a guide to action? The answer is yes – now more than ever.

Communicative capitalism

The fundamental premise of The Communist Manifesto is that economic production and circulation and the social organisation that follows from it are the basis of the politics and ideas characteristic of a particular epoch. From the perspective of political action, this means that those who are interested in revolutionary change have to begin with an understanding of the economy.

The Manifesto describes the world of nineteenth-century capitalism, what Marx refers to as the epoch of the bourgeoisie (although Engels is listed as co-author, he credited Marx for the basic ideas). Arising out of – and thereby destroying – feudal property relations, the bourgeoisie revolutionised production. ‘The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.’⁵ Markets grew. Rising demand and competition pushed the development of Modern Industry. Colossal productive forces were unleashed and with them a need for ceaseless expansion. The constant revolutionising of the instruments of production came to characterise the era. Past values and practices gave way before the value of exchange.

Bourgeois society is chaotic and contradictory. Modern Industry requires armies of workers who need wages to survive, a proletariat. The more developed, complex and specialised industry becomes, the more mind-numbing and repulsive the conditions of labour: the worker ‘becomes an appendage of the machine’. Livelihood, even life, is made ‘more and more precarious’. The enrichment of the bourgeoisie is accompanied by the pauperisation of the proletariat: the same competition that induces the capitalist to cut wages, compels the worker to accept the reduction. Overproduction generates crises such that production becomes destruction. Crises are endemic.

The Manifesto’s description of capitalist society is more accurate today than it was when it was written.⁶ The world in the twenty-first century is entirely subsumed by capitalism. The capitalist system is global. Competition, crises and precarity condition the lives of and futures of everyone on earth. No one escapes – although some have accumulated enough capital to allow them better to weather the storm than others. As of 2016, the world’s richest 62 people owned as much wealth as half the world’s population combined.⁷

Unlike the time of steam engines and telegraphs, contemporary capitalism relies on global telecommunications networks. From the complex logistics that support a trade system built on the concentration of industrial production in special economic zones, to the automation and informatisation of productive processes that standardise and accelerate production while decreasing the need for human labour-power, to the high-speed networks enabling algorithmic trading, hedging and arbitrage in financial markets, to the new capacity for capital to capture the activities through which we reproduce our social lives, capitalism today has become communicative.

In communicative capitalism, capitalist productivity depends on the expropriation and exploitation of communicative processes. Communication serves capital, whether in affective forms of care for producers and consumers, the mobilisation of sharing and expression as instruments for ‘human relations’ in the workplace, or the contributions to ubiquitous media circuits that provide ever more data and metadata that can be stored, mined and sold. Capitalism has subsumed communication such that communication does not provide a critical outside. In the digital networks of communicative capitalism, each communicative utterance or contribution adds something to the communicative flow. Whether a post is a lie doesn’t matter. Whether an article is ill-conceived is unimportant. What matters is simply that something was expressed, that a comment was made, that an image was liked and shared. Even something well-argued, true and important to a matter of real concern rarely or barely registers because the stream of contributions is endless, constant. Something else that is true and important will not just appear tomorrow but is appearing at the same time, in the same feed, making the same demands for attention. As contributions to circuits of information and affect, then, the content of our utterances is unimportant.

As the over-production of words and images intensifies and accelerates, the two merge into memes and emojis. Words are counted in word clouds, measured by number of times repeated rather than considered for what they might mean. People circulate images, unsure as to how ideas expressed in words will be interpreted or received. The decline in a capacity to transmit meaning, to symbolise beyond a limited discourse or immediate, local context, characterises communication’s reconfiguration into a primarily economic form. Critique becomes indistinguishable from endorsement as the adage ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ comes to characterise all mediated interactions – at least someone was paying attention. The channels through which we communicate reward number, getting us to believe through our practices that more is better, that popularity is the standard of value. Communicative interactions thereby take on the dynamics and attributes of markets and jettison their critical capacity.

Other names for ‘communicative capitalism’ are information society, knowledge economy and cognitive capitalism. They designate the same formation, but each highlights something different. ‘Information’ points to content, although hardware, software and circulation are implied. ‘Knowledge’ points to combinations of content and skill (know-how and know-that). ‘Cognitive’ suggests a narrow range of mental operations, a new use of brain power. It is linked to the idea of ‘immaterial labour’, which has been criticised for ignoring physical labour, embodiment and environmental impacts. ‘Communicative’ underscores the relation of contemporary networked capitalism to democracy. In communicative capitalism, capitalism merges with democracy, eliminating democracy’s capacity to designate a critical gap within the social field. Instead of the means by which the

Reviews for The Communist Manifesto

[allovertheboard · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

If you are an advocate for mass poverty, mass curtailment of all civil rights, destruction of the environment, genocide and ethnic cleansing, the destruction of religious institutions, mass alcoholism, depression and checmical dependency, and complete technological stagantion, then this is the book for you. On the other hand, you are very likely to inadvertently create an underground artistic-protest movement. I say communism has only killed 100 million people, let's give it another chance! Look how many "useful idiots" are recommending this book on this page alone.

[jonfaith · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

What can or should be said? This screed appears both pivotal and yet fantastic. How should we proceed and parse? I found it strange that I had never read this pamphlet. It goes with out saying that I had absorbed all of its aims previously by osmosis and secondary references. I marveled at its poetry and shuddered at the displayed certainty. Such ruminations on historical inevitability are simply chiliasm.

No one could fathom in the 19th Century how pernicious and gripping nationalism would prove nor, the ghostly strains of Islam, especially in Central Asia. The fact that capitalism could turn matter into liquid should've tipped off Karl and Fred about the nature of their foe. We have proved to be whores. We are also driven by baubles and thrive on peer recognition. Self Criticism was always going to be a hard sell. Marx and Engels announced their agenda in this manifesto. It was calmly stated that private property would be abolished. Collectivization flashed across my mind but appearing just as suddenly was the bloody strikebreaking in South Africa in 2012. Do you have a world to gain, Jacob Zuma? Oh those imps of our natures.

[darthdeverell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The MacMillan Collector’s Library edition of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto includes the 1888 Samuel Moore translation of “The Communist Manifesto,” “Wages, Price, and Profit” from 1898, and Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling’s 1887 translation of “Capital.” Hugh Griffith’s introduction offers biographical information about Marx and puts his work into its historical context, particularly after the apparent “victory” of capitalism over communism at the end of the Cold War, with Griffith arguing that, contrary to popular opinion, Marx remains as prescient as ever in light of the economics of post-industrial society. This edition reprints all three texts in their entirety and fully articulates Marx’s ideas of class and wage warfare. These remain must-reads for all students of history or economics today. Ironically, this edition makes a nice gift with its portable size, gilt edges, and classic dust jacket art.

[ts5_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Manifesto itself, is a profound and masterful work. What undoes this book, however, is the pitiful introduction by A.J.P Taylor. This introduction, unlike Marx's work, is an unimportant quibble of its time (1967). He rails on and on for 47 pages (longer than the manifesto itself!) about how 2 buddies from Germany managed to fool millions of people into believing their crazy deluded message, and how these two lads, working completely and always alone, utterly misunderstood history and economics and sociology down to the core. The work itself is a classic simply because millions of people have been deluded into worshipping it, but the men themselves were self-obsessed and narcissistic and thought themselves gods among men, when in fact they were poor economists, and even poorer historians.A.J.P. Taylor wrote this in 1967, and one cannot understand why on earth such an introduction could be commissioned or approved to accompany the Manifesto. I can only imagine what the public opinion of communism must have been like at the time - fear and loathing of the USSR alongside complete and total faith in capitalism. In an amusing passage, Taylor takes a break from criticizing Marx to "disprove" his critique of capitalism in the light of modern history, arguing that capitalism has proven itself after the little hiccup of the '30s. Well, it's 2011, and today economists like Nouriel Roubini are questioning capitalism altogether and the world is mired in collective contemplation on how to save the world economy. It seems that despite all of Taylor's fluff, Marx and Engels turned out to be far more timeless thinkers than he was.Read the Manifesto, just don't read this version. It is nothing more than publishers wanting to make more pennies by pawning Marx's writings off with fluff-filler as an addendum.

[a1abwriter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Just finished the communist manifesto. In an ideal world communism and democracy would combine to create a form of government where the individual is represented and respected while the state takes away the burned of merely existing like men of ole. Working only to provide: food, water, shelter, clothing, and transportation. Leaving man to focus on the development of self AND state. I know the only way a society like that could ever be is with the total annihilation of capitalism (not democracy) and the social enlightenment that self-worth derived from competition is false and that self worth starts internally and THEN extends out, no costume or mask that one adorns can ever really give value because material does not last as long as self and value in material things fade soon as the "thing" fades.

[glennbell_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a short essay by Karl Marx. His ideas seem to be in response to dislike for Western capitalism. His ideas are radical and do not appear to be practical as evidenced by history. Reality and theory do not match. Interesting from a historical standpoint.

[kawgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

No matter what one's political point of view is, this is a must read for those who wish to be informed.

[sasham-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Reading this with the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see the many flaws in the communist theory. On the other hand I can see how so many could have been persuaded that it was a good idea in the 19th & early 20th centuries - if you were working all your life and getting nowhere, with no hope of an improvement of life for yourself or your children the communist ideals would have sounded attractive.

[heidilove_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an amazing work. You don't have to agree with it or follow it to glean the beauty and precision of it.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The original and still the best. Fuck Capital; my Marxism is about people. And feelings, and I challenge you to find a more inspirational, quotable piece of reductive ideological propaganda anywhere, including the Bible. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! Yeah?
This version comes with a bunch of prefaces to later editions, mostly by Engels, and as well as geenrally interesting also kind of a laff riot. "Polish independence! Italian Renaissance! I know one thing about each of your countries!" Good times.

[beequiet · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Marx, it's nice, like victoria sponge, but I prefer gateau, such as Foucault and Adorno and Horkheimer. They further advance the ideas started by marx (like gateau advances the idea of cake). Marx is naive (here ends cake metaphor), but then he was relying on historical context...ah the benefit of hindsight...Really, if you like Marx, read The Culture Industry, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Horkheimer and Adorno (of the Frankfurt School).

[scartertn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I needed something to balance out "The Law" by Bastiat. Interesting reading.

[sharrison_99 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A book famous for many reasons, the most obvious being its simple political impact. This book by Karl Marx, has affected the lives of millions of people in the world, and its impact is monumental. Now you have most likely heard of this book, but if you further wish to understand the thing that is Communism, and revolution which brings upon it, I strongly recommend you read this book. This book is not an easy read per say, and could most likely be summarized in about a page, but it is still a great book to skim through to further educate oneself on politics.

[chellinsky · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Do not go looking here for a lengthy explanation about why Marx believes what he does. Rather, read the Manifesto to learn how he sold his ideas. For what it was designed to do, this book is excellent. For actually understanding Marx, the Manifesto is lacking. A closer look at some of his other works is required.

[bdtrump · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Read this years ago in high school, and decided to take another look as a graduate student. As one of Marx's major works, he articulates a desire for a shift away from corporatism, familial inheritance, and other trappings of a burgeoning bourgeois society. However, he doesn't offer much of a solution or ideas to reach these ends - much to the chagrin of those who followed his ideals.

It's also easy to not understand the position from which Marx writes this - his time period was one of revolution and appalling standards of living among most of Europe.

If this was a ranking of the work's importance, it would rank 5/5. However, given the limitations of explanation on how to carry out his goals, 3/5.

Even if you disagree with many of the ideas presented here (as I clearly do), it is worth reading at least once.

[rebelwriter85 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is my favorite book. Everyone should be required to read it in school.

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Important as a source and vividly written, though I do not agree with all of it.

[terpsichoreus · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It is an error to assume that the problem with humanity is an inability to recognize our own problems. While it's true that we constantly look outside for answers, this is just because we are unhappy with the answers we have. We know that success requires hard work and knowledge, but we want something easier. We will accept an easier answer even when it isn't true. We are not motivated by what is true or likely, but by frightening or enticing stories.We are driven away from the necessary and the difficult by our inadequacies and fears, and so rarely move ourselves any closer to fulfillment. In a perversity of justice, those who do achieve the things which we imagine would fulfill us (wealth, fame, beauty, genius) are no more fulfilled than the average man, and just as beset by inadequacy and fear. Often, more so.Transhumanism represents a hope that we can escape this pattern of ignorance and self-destruction but only by escaping the human bodies and minds that cannot control themselves.The Manifesto always seemed little more than a sad reminder of our failings, though it did motivate people and provided a test of the mettle of humanity. Beyond that, it does more to rile than to increase understanding of the economy and our role within it. It is sad that a work which is at least based on some worthwhile principles falls to the same simple fears and ideals that plague our everyday lives.The manifesto tries to take all of the economic theory of its authors and create from it a story that will excite the common man. They did not expect that most of them would pick up Das Kapital and start really thinking about their role in things. It was enough to engage their greed and sense of injustice without intruding much on their understanding.The average man does not want to understand, he would prefer to believe. It is unfortunate that the main effect proven by the Communist movement is that any and every political system simply shifts wealth and power from one group to another, and little aids the serf or the unlucky.We Americans are in little position to stand over the 'failure of Communism', since democracy has not proven any kinder to mankind, nor can it deliver justice equally to the poor and the rich.

[ertreada · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I reread this book or more appropriately this pamphlet as a part of my observation of a high school World History class. I had read it many years before but found it interesting and deeper meaning looking back at it. Say what you will about communism and Marx but like it or not they are both a part of our world. The students seemed to find it confusing due to its older style of writing of the turn of the century. As we discussed what some of the more confusing paragraphs were about the students became more engaged and enjoyed this primary source. As a teacher this is a great way to introduce the rise of communism post WWII.

[robertday_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What to make of this slim volume that everyone has heard of but few have read? (And even fewer have read properly.) First, it's essential to dump your preconceptions, and forget world history since 1917. Marx (with the support of Engels) was describing the economic world as he saw it, based on his studies of history and economy; and then he looked forward to what he saw as the inevitable outcome of that system. Though his analysis was ultimately flawed because history turned out differently, his analysis remains incontrovertible. Even though our world and our working lives are totally changed from that of 1848, it remains true that those who do not have independent means have to sell the only thing at their disposal, that is their labour. That is true whether those people (call them workers, call them the proletariat, the names are unimportant) sell the labour of their muscles, their hands and eyes, or their brains. And if those people cannot alleviate the conditions under which they have to sell that labour, if they cannot get a fair deal or a fair price for that labour, then they will eventually revolt. When Marx wrote the Manifesto, that revolution had to take place in a physical way because the bulk of workers did not have a franchise. Now, the 'revolt' takes the form of our voting a new Government into power every five years or so - though we are now seeing, in the early years of the 21st Century, that exercising a limited vote for political groupings that offer very similar things to each other - or worse still, only offer least worst options - is a route fraught with dangers.That those who brought about socialist revolution in the 20th Century took this book as their guide has closed many minds to it. Of course, if you are starting a revolution, you can point to things in this book and claim you are acting in accordance with Marxist thought. It is more honest to acknowledge your debt to those who have gone before and stand in the name of your own ideology (as indeed Marx did); but people don't do that, because it means that they might have to take responsibility for their actions. It is far easier to say 'I only did what it said in the Manifesto/the Bible/the Qur'an/Mein Kampf/(insert other sacred text of choice)". So this book and Karl Marx gets wrongly blamed for much that happened long after he died.Do not let that colour your reading of 'The Communist Manifesto'. Rather, read it, challenge its application to our times, use what seems appropriate and disregard what seems inappropriate. And yes, cry "Working men of all countries, unite!"

[hemlokgang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this book among a stack my daughter no longer wanted and since I had never read it, I decided to see what all the fuss has been about. I was surprised that it was written in 1848. I thought it was a 1900s document. I found it to be fascinating. The fact that Marx really saw the discovery of America and the Industrial Revolution as the beginning of the problem was something I had not known. I was also impressed at Marx's foresight in terms of the process of capitalism. Frankly, I agree with much of his interpretation of the problems of capitalism and rampant materialism, which has continued to progress as he predicted. The problem for me is that his solution does not seem viable to me. I am no great philosopher or economist, but my sense is that there will always be leaders, and as the world population grows there will just be more of them. I may just be cynical, but I think that putting any group in power, even the righteous proletariat, will eventually lead to greed and power struggle. Glad to have read this.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Compelling propaganda pamphlet, much shorter than I thought.

[clancy.coonradt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One reason why this book has stood the test of time and become a major talking point for a host of instructional formats is that it is written in an easily understood and comprehensive manner. I does not deviate from its intent in an attempt to justify its claims, but rather keeps to the point and finishes concisely.

[madepercy-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How does one rate a classic? If one could only change the world in 30 pages or so! What always strikes me is that, much like Dr John Hewson's Fightback! policy from the early 1990s, most of the pamphlet has been implemented already (sans the revolution, and admittedly Hewson's work was considerably longer at 650 pages!). Nevertheless, of the ten "measures" (p. 20), Australia has, over time, implemented many of the plans through what, in some ways, still displays remnants of social democracy. However, as with Fightback!, and while many like to think it was all nonsense, much of it has been done or is still in the doing. Whether the great Internationale will die with the contemporary return to nationalism is a moot point when one considers the exponential increase in growth and power of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" (not to mention India, which is quite another story). But this probably won't concern me, at least in this life.

[danielalgara · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

What a load of malarky. Merely a treatise on mediocrity and a manual on how a minority might rule the majority. I would love to dismantle this nonsense here, but I'm not sure anybody is going to read this, so I'll spare my metacarpals.
The education rant, however, sounds oddly familiar. It sounds like the US dept. of education cut and pasted this section right into their own manifesto on how to educate American children.

Silly commies, freedom's for capitalists.

Rant:

Why does everyone keep repeating "capitalists-imperialist." GOVERNMENTS create empires. Government IS empirical in nature which is what's advocated by Marx-Engels. Capitalist and imperialist are conflicting terms since governments create monopolies, a free market is politically and socially blind.

Sorry Marxists, history supports these assertions.

[mccarthys_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The rantings of a man who's ideology would work only in the smallest of settings, or perhaps in a utopia. Attempts at implementing the policies laid out in this work have killed millions outright and millions more from starvation and poverty. Reading this is a matter of knowing your enemy.

[amandacb_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I took a graduate-level literary theory class and picked socialism as my topic of choice over which to complete a semester-long project and presentation. Boy, am I ever glad I did.I remember in high school I had heard so much negativity about communism and socialism; I cracked open my textbook to the glossary to find the actual definitions, and was left only with vague impressions and more questions.Finally, I had some answers. This is a volume that I think everyone should read before they spout off misinformed ideas and opinions over communism and socialism. So many base their opinions off of fundamentalists--after all, we don't judge all Christians on the slight margin of fundamentalist Christians, don't we? (Well, we shouldn't.) And so on. Many have taken Marx's ideas and twisted and distorted them to their own agendas. This has led people to mistrust and dislike communism and socialism upon just hearing the words.However, if you read Marx's ideas, they are fundamentally logical and sound. Maybe not exactly plausible, but definitely something worth thinking about.

[ramirez_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For many people through the years this book has been something similar to the Qur'an.It's a compelling and fascinating though short text, a look backward in time.

[ironicqueery · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This reading brings up more questions than it answers. Part I is really good about explaining current conditions of the "proletariat". However, Part II, which seems like an attempt to explain why Communism is in the best interest for the masses, seems to be all dogma with little supporting fact behind it. Here is where are the questions are left unanswered. Part III and IV talk about opposing forms of changing the status quo, ie socialism, etc. However, since Part II left so many unanswered questions, it's hard to reject the status quo or alternative options to the revolutation the Manifesto is urging. The writing overall was fabulous - easy to understand and follow for the most part. But more writing is needed to fully understand the concepts Mark and Engels are advocating.

[angelic55blonde · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a classic and should be read. It is really small but powerful.