The Communist Manifesto Paperback – May 3, 2011

It’s funny to me; the CM is so short and concise that all of detractors of leftist movements would learn they share many aspects with said leftists. My point: read the damn thing before you try to speak intelligently on the subject. Instead, we hear catchphrases and mantras of belief rather than news of what’s reality. Marx really isn’t saying anything extreme in his manifesto, if one orients from a place of empathy and compassion for others. Supporting a systemic structure that depends on undue “donations” to the people that need it the least. The rich are, by and large, living off the labor of the people. The USA is socialist if one is affluent and everyone else gets a twisted form of feudalism in which the illusion of property is painted so the bourgeoisie can keep their heads. Fun stuff.

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'm not a subscriber to this article of thought but this doesn't make me opposite to some of the ideas prescribed.The flawed glance of the communist believes its systems never fails but is rather the fault of the user.I made sure to read this material once more to prove to myself how I have come to feel about communism and why. There is certainly more material to follow and there is a good reason why communism has the appeal it has over the centuries.Marx ,I believe, is given too much credit for his theories and viewpoints on the subject while Engels is sometimes left in the dustbin.Don't worry how you feel about this or what you've heard; just pick it up and read for yourself.

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.