The Communist Manifesto

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Summary: A great historical document with insight
Review: This book is more of an inflamatory phamphlet than an intellectual overview of an ideology. But still it is unique and pretty interesting. The bourgeoisie, having taken control from the feudal structures the means of production in the unrestrained capitalist system, overproduces, overextends, speculates itself into great trouble and has to compete with new foreign markets. During this process the proletariat has its wages forced downward, becomes nothing more than appendages of machines. The proletariat become united in their increasing oppression and increasingly organise to fight the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoise is overthrown, with the petite bourgeois somewhere in between depending on the circumstances. It is inevitable that the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie and set up a "dictatorship of the proletariat" which will transition society to one which will be "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

It is pretty clear, regardless of Bakunin's fulminations, that Marx and Engels hardly had in mind the dictatorship "of the proletariat" that Lenin set up. They seemed to have had in mind the Paris Commune of 1871.

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Summary: Down With Capitalism!!!!!!!!
Review: Capitalism. It is everywhere. This is not a good thing, which is what you will learn once you read "The Communist Manifesto". It shows you how businesses have shaped society to their liking and can control whatever they wish. Haunting, yet, beautiful. Read it.

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Summary: This says it all
Review: USSR and China were corrupted by Stalin not Marx. Read it for yourself. He's right, has been proven thus far right, and will be proven right.

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Summary: Great Manifesto- absurd introduction
Review: The Communist Manifesto is what it is- take it or leave it. What is interesting in this particular case is the absurd introduction to this particular Manifesto- why didn't the publishers just insert some old "Volkischer Beobachter" articles on The Jewish/Bolshevik Conspiracy as the introduction? There is a 22 page anti-communist diatribe by old Cold Warrior Martin Malia in the beginning of this edition. Its basic purpose seems to be to deny the existence of class warfare and to shore up the teetering foundations of the current Great Myth of the moral superiority of capitalism. "...it is necessary to be Marxist to gamble other people's sufferings..." !?!- isn't this the very reality of capitalism too? The sneering tone and the use of phrases like "...Marx's Specter crashing into really-existing history." are silly. I would counter Mr. Malia's Chuck Norris evaluation of history by using his own words- the result of the wager (on capitalist "liberal democracy") is not "human emancipation" but literal bondage in many parts of the so-called "Free World".

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Summary: An alternate economic & political system?
Review: Marx's "Communist Manifesto" is a response to human cost of Industrial Revolution. It was a time when Europe was coming of age, with the development of modern industry and the potential world market. This market had an immense development to commerce, to navigation and to industry. These improvements were enacted at a cost of society as a whole divided into two hostile camps -the bourgeoise and the proletariat. Marx immersed himself into the suffrage of the new urban proletariat at the hands of bourgeoise modern capitalist. His solution lay in the abolition of private property living in a society where all are equal.

I found this document an interesting read, as this short concise book simply explains the "theory" of one economic system. It should be noted the democracy prevalent at the time of this books introduction closely resembled an oligarchy, in which the rich and powerful ruled the weak. The impact of socialist ideology on this situation was great: labor movements were created, egalitarianism became a greater part of democracy ideology and the lower classes became more significant to the political system than they had ever been before.

The greatest weakness one can note of Marx's argument, is his failure to predict the significance of the middle class in the nations. Marx's view was that the middle class would either be absorbed into the working class or proprietors. The success of the middle class in present times accounts for the failure of Marx's theory.

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Summary: Important Piece of Politics
Review: Many of the negative reviewers may not have even read the book and the reviewer who compared this work to Darwin is a complete moron.Darwins theory has to be one of the greatest achievements of our civilization it is the backbone of modern science.Marx's book is simply a political/philosophical attack on government Anyhow this book is thought provoking and interesting if you can get past the corruptions of modern china and the old ussr.

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Summary: A dark spiritual classic.
Review: Written by Marx and Engels as a tract to stimulate the workers of Europe (in particular) to revolution, Communist Manifesto is more readable than many of Marx' other works, its style simpler and more lively. At times the rhetoric rises to the level of eloquent. As one of the most influential works in human history, it seems to me any person who wishes to understand the modern world will want to be somewhat familiar with its contents.

It is true Marx did not predict revolution in "backwards" countries like Russia and China, but rather in countries like America and Germany. The fact that he made such prophecies at all shows how little his doctrines had to do with science; that they failed (at the time) shows his weaknesses as a religious oracle. But that is the category to which this work belongs: Marx is a religious revolutionary in the tradition of Mohammed and Hong Xiuquan, the Monkey King's assault on Heaven, or Promethius' war on the gods. (On the latter of which he wrote his doctoral dissertation.) That 150 years later society has come to resemble a few of his prophecies (though others not at all) hardly qualifies him as a respectable co-founder of social science, unless we admit that all social science is quackery and mumbo-jumbo. (Which may be arguable.)

What Marxist revolutionaries captured of Marx was not so much his economic plan (which had already proven in error) but his spirit, shown more explicitly here than in his more "scholarly works." The great Marxist revolutionaries did not copy Marx to the letter in terms of economic programs -- how could they? Nor in revolutionary strategy -- what did he know of the future? But even when they ignored the political program Marx lays out, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Guzman, and others, were near carbon copies of their Master as revealed in terms of psychology -- ruthless, unwilling to allow disagreement, ready to "abolish all morality, all eternal truths, all religion," a spectre of collective self-justifying cruelty that would haunt not just Europe, but the world. I often wonder, reading works by Marx, how stolid academic Marxists can overlook the most obvious and truly influential element in Marx' writings: his hatred. It is that hatred that makes this one of the less wearying of Marx's works to read, because it is fairly short.

Author, Jesus and the Religions of Man (including Marxism)

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Summary: Global Leviathan
Review: No work has caught the passage of the emerging liberal state confronting the contradictions of the global leviathan in a vacuum of global transnationalism better than this Manifesto of Marx and Engels. Associated with Bolshevism, this work speaks better to an earlier time before 'democracy' had crystallized into its modern meaning still short of the aspirations of equality realized. At the time of its composition, a generation of desperate struggle remained to outlaw the worst evils of child labor in factories. Universal suffrage was still utopian dreaming, a feat still in the future. And the initiative of the generation after this manifesto did the job where the economic powers resisted every step of the way and rewrote the definition of freedom. The association of this work then with totalitarianism is entirely confusing, and demands close scrutiny of its layers of context. It is also true this work was written in the passage of revolutionary expectations of the year 1848, after which Marx and Engels changed their tactics and worked to bring about the great Social Democratic Movement of the end of the nineteenth century (cf. for example M. Harrinton, Socialism). It is difficult now to understand the multidimensional perspectives that every ideology has distilled from the background of this piercing work, without whose impetus ironically the liberal societies the world cherishes would most assuredly never have come to be. For the captains of industries did not create our present societies. This work will haunt the capitalist system for as long as it endures. cf. Marx and Engels, Nimtz Socialism, Michael Harrington Many editions, Norton Critical Edition,Verso edition with essay by Hobsbawm, commentary by Hal Draper...

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Summary: An eternal call for destruction
Review: His Satanic Majesty Karl Marx (and I mean that in the mythological, not religious sense) never in his entire life cared one whit for the facts. As is attested to by every person who knew him, he 'felt' first and then distorted every fact he could find to fit his preconceptions. This made him in no way a scientist, but a third-rate literary Romantic. This book, although oh-so-cleverly written, is fiction from the first letter to the last period. Marx, of titanic ego and equally titanic hate, should be consigned to the dust-bin of history. It's a horrific shame so many dim-bulbs still fall for this evil nonsense. But, in the future as in the past, they always will. The blind leading the blind.

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Summary: Intellectual Integrity
Review: If intellectual integrity is your purpose, or you think of yourself as an intellectual, a thinker or simply "a person interested in ideas" you will read this book. Then you will read "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal" by Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand smashed the intellectual absurdities of Marx. She challanged them at their base - Kant's view of reality as unknowable and reason as impotent, and Hegel's new "dialectic logic". She called for a return to real logic (Aristotle's good old logic), and reason as man's basic tool of survival.

By his nature man must be free, in order to survive - she said. And just look what happend to Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany (National SOCIALISM), China and Cuba. Where people starved to death or murdered (and still do) - and there are no human rights whatsoever. These are NOT unintended "accidents" which do not reflect the real spirit of Communism. They come from Communism's basic assumption - that the individuall can (and should) be sacrificed to the state, the productive to the parasitical, and everyone to everyone else.

If you are sincere, you will (after reading both) - toss one of them away. That one will be this "Manifesto". The greatest death-bringer of the last couple of centuries.