The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto

Front page of the German 1st edition.

Author Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels Published 1848-02-?? Type Non-fiction Genre Political Document Themes Political Science, Politics Age Group Adult

The Communist Manifesto, originally titled Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, is a political pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, first published in Germany in February 1848. This document is in the public domain.

In the document, the authors express their view that all the conflicts in societies throughout history are due to a struggle between classes, specifically the proletariat (working poor) and bourgeoisie (wealthy). They detail many of the problems with capitalism, explain how these problems would be solved with their version of communism, distinguish their political philosophy from somewhat similar socialist ideas, and ultimately call for the forceful replacement of governments with communism.

Personal

Own?	No.
Read?	Samuel Moore translation.
Finished	2020-03-12.

Having spent my childhood being told that communism is evil and against everything American, and then spending my adulthood discovering that American values are actually pretty abhorrent and American history as it's taught to children is completely wrong, I decided to read this manifesto to see what it's really about. I wasn't very impressed with it, but I found several enduring parts.

Review

Overall:

Good

• Many of the goals set forth in the document are worthy causes like the elimination of child labor and the creation of public schools to provide education to all people rather than just the children of the wealthy.
• The authors counter the argument "the elimination of private land ownership will also eliminate individual freedom," by pointing out that, if "freedom" is a product of owning land, than everyone who doesn't own land is not free. And, since all land is already owned, and most of it by a relatively small amount of people with no reason to relinquish it, the vast majority of people can only ever become free by violently wresting that land from private ownership. However, if land is owned by everyone, then, by ensuring that everyone owns the land, you ensure that everyone has "freedom."

Bad

• The book is by no means a primer on politics. The authors expect the reader to not only be familiar with various forms of political systems as well as the political writers and leaders of the 1800s. This seems rather counter-intuitive since the target audience for the manifesto is the proletariat, which are generally uneducated on these topics. When I read it, I lacked a lot of that knowledge, so much of the work was lost on me.
• Many of the objectives in the document have since been shown to be bad ideas. For example:
  • Giving the state a full monopoly over major aspects of society frequently backfires because people are generally misinformed and elect highly charismatic, but ultimately incompetent, people to rule over them.
  • When people don't view property as their "own," they tend to not take pride in it, and thus fail to care for it or abuse it, see tragedy of the commons.
  • Forcing city dwellers to uproot and move into the country to create equal levels of population everywhere would create a massive problem with the distribution of goods and tons of pollution from unnecessary travel.
  • The forced elimination of cultural identity, like those in the form of religion and creed, has disastrous results. While I agree that a world without religion could be better, the secular benefits of religion (like a sense of community) need to be maintained as it winds down. Religions tend to die off on their own as people lives are made better, so, a more organic approach would be to just make people's lives better.
• The authors say society cannot be changed to communism through education or unions, but only through violent revolution since those who have authority always refuse to relinquish it. However, even in a communistic society, people will acquire power, which means the authors are essentially admitting that every communistic society will inevitably fail and forever require bloody revolutions to keep it in place. This doesn't sound like a tenable model for a society. But at least they own up to the fact that their model requires violence to institute.

Ugly

• No scientific data is presented to back any of the claims made through the work, and a lot of the claims seem rather far-fetched. For example, the first section states that all social conflicts are the ultimately result of class struggle (however, if that were true, people in the same class should never fight over matters of religion, race, culture, sports teams, etc.). It also says there are ultimately only two types of people in a society, the working poor (proletariat) and wealthy (bourgeoisie), but binaries like these rarely exist in a reality full of gradients. So much of the document has a, "just take our word for it," attitude which I find particularly dangerous in politics.
• Most of the document is just a vilification of rich people and the praise of the working poor. A huge amount of blanket statements are made for both groups like that rich men don't respect their wives or families, but see them as employees to exploit. It's hard to see this as anything short of bigotry.

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