The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Classics) Paperback – August 27, 2002

I really enjoyed this book. It’s a quick read and his theory is very aligned with cultural reality. Socialism works mainly based on the culture of people. So does communism. You have to be open minded and approach this reading as general knowledge that helps you to understand other sciences (e.g., economics, philosophy, sociology, politics). You cannot expect to understand any one science by reading or studying that one subject area only.

Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848 at the request of the Communist League, a secret association of workers driven underground by political oppression aimed at preventing concerted revolutionary activity against bourgeois regimes throughout Europe. The Manifesto was written to provide a theoretical foundation and a practical program for the advancement of international communism and eventual elimination of bourgeois domination of property-less wage laborers.The title of the document, simple and purely descriptive though it is, is commonly regarded as inflammatory, arousing derision, disdain, and virulent hostility among many, including those whom it was written to benefit. Nevertheless, there is much in the Manifesto, especially in the first chapter, that with the aid of hindsight could have been written by a contemporary neo-conservative intellectual, someone like Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell.Specifically, Marx and Engels begin with a tribute to the unparalleled productive capacity of the capitalist organization of production. They freely laud the technological innovations fostered by capitalists' pursuit of surplus value, a process that has dramatically transformed the forces of production and the social relations of production. The result has been rapidly expanding output of industrial and agricultural goods of all kinds.In accomplishing this, capital has extended its markets beyond national borders, creating a world market and a world economy. Raw materials from Latin America, Africa, and Asia are routinely used to manufacture finished goods in England, Germany, and other European countries. The same manufactured goods may then be sold in the very places that supplied the raw materials.All this, Marx and Engels observe, requires concentration of vast numbers of people in swollen industrial cities. Small manufacturers and family farms are swallowed up by larger enterprises with which they have neither the capital nor productive capacity to compete. Marx and Engels find it particularly noteworthy that men like Thomas Jefferson had envisioned America as a land of independent yeoman farmers with small land holdings, but the concentration of agriculture was rendering this vision obsolete.As we get farther into this brief document, Daniel Bell, the other neo-conservatives, and people generally may take angry exception to its tone and substance.Concentration of resources in capital-intensive enterprises, Marx and Engels argue, reduces the vast majority of people to the degraded status of wage labor, workers who own nothing but their labor power. It is in the interests of the bourgeoisie -- of capital -- to pay workers as little as possible, increasing surplus value by buying labor power for no more than its natural price, the amount needed to survive and reproduce.The culture of workers is nothing more than a brutalizing culture of production, lacking in scope and richness due to the pitifully small part that each worker plays in the overall production process. Families of working people are men, women, and children who labor for the natural price and have little time, energy or emotional sustenance to offer each other, having been wrung dry by capital's conditions of employment.The more productive the worker, the more he or she strengthens the hand of capital. However, capital's immense productive power and its success in keeping wage rates abysmally low are not an unmixed blessing for the bourgeoisie. Periodic over-production crises wreck havoc with national and international markets, undercutting profits and threatening the commanding position of capital. As a timely example, the U.S. economy is currently approximating an over-production crisis: unemployment is high, wages are low and falling, capital has roughly two and a half trillion dollars to invest, but in the absence of demand the bourgeoisie has become risk averse, and money is not being invested in productive endeavors.The long-term solution to all this, for Marx and Engels, is elimination of bourgeois property and the property relations that capitalism has created. This is not to say that private property must altogether disappear, but private property as capital, as that which creates a two-class system of exploitation of labor by the bourgeoisie, certainly must cease to exist.Marx and Engels were entirely too sanguine about the eventual joining together of members of the working class to present a united front in their conflict with capital. They realized that there were ethnic, racial, religious, national, linguistic, occupational, and other barriers that would be difficult to overcome, but I doubt they expected the workers of the world to be as fractionated as is currently the case. If Marx and Engels were alive today, they might take the view that things would have to get much worse for labor before a revolution becames possible.If you're not inclined to read the Manifesto, just read the introductory remarks by Vladimir Posner, once a member of the Communist Party of the USSR. Posner spent much of his childhood and adolescence in the West, and his insights into the appeal of communist ideals and the failure of the USSR to develop communism as Marx and Engels sketchily envisioned it are extremely interesting. Posner is no apologist for anything, just an honest and intelligent journalist whose idealism is genuine but far from boundless or excessive.

I bought 30 of these to hand out at school, and there was so much demand! I managed to hand out all of them within a day, people were so excited to get a copy of it. We all took ours to the Mexican Bakery. The content is also really good, it's very enlightening and brings some interesting thoughts to mind. Me and my friends have had some really good discussions about communism. This version is also quite nice, it's just the manifesto, no unnecessary filler that some other versions have, it makes it much lighter to carry around and smaller, and makes it so that it's all communism, all the time. My main critique and the reason for the only 4 stars is that although this version is cheap, having to spend money for it goes against the communist vision, which is why I give them away for free, but it's cheaper here than most other places. Would very highly recommend!!!!!!!

I've given this a 5 star rating because it is the authoritative edition and most well articulated appeal to communism I've ever read. After reading this book one has to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask did communism empower the working class? Did it create equality? Did it provide a more prosperous happier life for people? And if not why are its contents still so appealing to humanity and surprisingly to many Americans? And although it is the extreme of socialism why does socialism continue to appeal to so many? And why does its rhetoric continue to influence our political and social dialogue?Marx's writes with such powerful clarity where he crystallizes his appeal to the working class with the resounding first line of the book: "A spectre is haunting Europe - The spectre of Communism." And it indeed did haunt Europe through two world wars, the cold war and continues to do so into the 21st century. It is now 2012 and we have the hindsight of the great scientific experiments of the German socialist Nazis, the Bolshevik driven communist, the Maoist Chinese and many more highly socialist European nations. We also have the recent financial breakdowns within the European Union and major financial crises in America all still heavily influenced by much of the contents of this manifesto. I am reminded daily of its power as the Manifesto still rings in many of today's conversations whether it is the cry of Occupy Wall Street or the discussion of redistribution of wealth or more equality between classes.Much of what Marx called for has come to fruition such as the introduction of the progressive tax, even private ownership is under assault in the United States. Moreover, one must fully understand this call to communism to have a perspective on such things as the Federal Reserve and income tax. How should one digest today's political banter of "what is a fair tax" and a "fair share of taxes"? After all a heavily progressive or graduated tax is the second pillar of the Communist Manifesto only trumped by the abolition of private property. So how could a nation such as the United States which fought so hard to provide the individual with the most liberty in the history of mankind agree to allow an income tax and at that one that at times in mid 20th century exceeded 90% and today sits at 35%? Prior to 1913 the US had no income tax and it amended the constitution to not only add an income tax but also add a federal reserve both of which resulted in the greatest transfers of power away from the individual to the federal government in the history of the United States. This is in direct alignment to the second pillar of the Communist Manifesto. By definition income tax suggests that the government owns a portion of our lives and labor. In socialism it owns a lot more of it and in communism it owns all of it. Intrigued? Then read this book and see how it continues to apply to our lives, liberty and freedoms.