The Manifesto of the Communist Party

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 would be benevolent for some unknown and unexplained reason.



I do like the idea of workers of the world uniting though. Collectively owned businesses. Big thumbs up. Keeping one’s share of the means of production. Also great. But like all old political and economic texts, we give too much credit to its creators. Marx was just a man. People do the same thing with the U.S. Constitution too; they think it’s flawless.