A 29-page essay that catalyzed a global political movement.
Growing up the US, we are indoctrinated with the philosophy that anything related to Socialism or Communism is the work of all that is evil.
In reality, any form of government contains benevolent ideals that are corrupted by malevolent actors.
After visiting Vietnam, where they are raised in a society that heralds Communism as all that is holy, I wanted to get some reference to the original philosophies that inspired this global revolution.
The Communist Manifesto is a short read, but a fascinating one. The first half describes the inevitability of the lower classes rising up to usurp power from their oppressive rulers. This is not a call for mutiny, but merely a prophecy of the unavoidable. The latter gives thoughts on some of the fallacies of the various Communist movements organizing at the time of the manual’s writing, and offers clarifications on communism and suggestions on how to be more effective.
My takeaway: I carry the same view I did before reading this.. no ideology is perfect, and its merit rests in the hands of those who carry forward its tenants. I’m just now more informed of some of the alternatives.
Notable Excerpts
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.
What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
All that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.