Communist Manifesto, socialist landmark

a new appreciation written for the Labour Party

159 pages

English language

Published July 16, 1954

OCLC Number:
001539888

View on OpenLibrary

3 stars (3 reviews)

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

One of the most influential political tracts ever published this short book succinctly explains the aims and purpose of the Communist League of the 19th century, giving the author’s theories of the class struggle which they assumed would inevitably lead to world wide communism.

Full text available at Project Gutenberg too: www.gutenberg.org/files/61/61.txt

131 editions

Review of 'The communist manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

3.6 stars. If this were written today, people would demand research, stats, and data to support its conclusions. There were a lot of declarations where Marx and Engels just said things. “The proletariat is this,” and “The bourgeois thinks that” type of phrasing.

There also oddly seemed like there were unfinished thoughts. For example, free education and the abolishment of child labor is advocated for, and the paragraph where this is discussed ends with “etc, etc.” Really Marx? “etc, etc?” I can see Lenin now, channeling his inner Marx — “We’re going give power to the worker, and like, whatever.”

It also decried prison reform, humanitarianism, and the prevention of the cruelty to animals as “conservative bourgeois socialism.” That seems a bit cynical to me. The manifesto seems to be implying that these issues would just go away without the bourgeois, and that a society where workers are in control …

Subjects

  • Socialism