The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Classics) by Marx, Karl, Engels, Friedrich (2002) Paperback Paperback – January 1, 2002

Good read! Enjoyed it! Audio book available which is awesome! Would be better if Amazon doesn’t force me to write more than I want to when it comes to rating books!

Great book and concepts written throughout but it was a little hard for me to understand at times. I do not know if it was my fault or the way it was written but I would recommend this for sure.

Very Important to understand the communist thinking and goals !

Must read for all to see how the left thinks.

Hail Communism

Hmmm, not everyone is going to see things or do things the same way. That's life. We all just have to deal with it in harmony.

"The Communist Manifesto," like the Bible, the Qur'an, and "The Origin of Species," falls into that category of books that are more discussed than read. Many people feel entitled to hold an opinion about each of those (along with many others) without having read them or even held a copy in their hands. This is because when a book becomes a symbol of a social movement or a belief system, it may not even be necessary to read it.However, there's no excuse in this case; in this translation, the book is barely 50 pages, and while the references may be somewhat outdated, they shouldn't be obscure to a reasonably educated reader. I confess that I first read "The Communist Manifesto" in high school, primarily out of a desire to be edgy and provocative, and hardly understood any of it. It does require at least a rudimentary knowledge of European history, and the Penguin Classics edition, like the one I encountered in high school, is just the text of the work itself - no preface, no interpretive essays, no mini-biographies of Marx and Engels, no references or footnotes. If you want background and explication, you'll have to look elsewhere.In college, I took a stab at "Capital," getting about halfway through the first volume. I prepared myself by reading Hegel, which is essential to understanding Marx, who took the Hegelian Dialectic for granted. Hegel formulated a theory of history based on conflict and its resolution; what he called Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. A system arises, an opposing force develops, and eventually the two combine to create a new system, which eventually undergoes the same process. Applying this to social economics, Marx viewed communism not as something that *should* replace capitalism, but something that inevitably *would* replace it. Any sensitive person would have seen the horrendous exploitation of workers in 19th century London as an abomination; the rural poor were abandoning farming and moving into the cities to slave away in the factories that were producing the stuff of the new industrial economy. Marx viewed this system as unsustainable. In the Hegelian Dialectic, improvement would not come about through a sense of civic duty or a vision of mankind reaching some lofty potential, but as a natural development, from antiquity to the feudalism and artisanal economy of the Middle Ages, through the bourgeois industrial age, and finally to the worker's paradise of the communist future."The Communist Manifesto" is not a party platform, so the following points that Marx describes are not a recommended program, but a description, or even a prediction, of what society must develop into. So it's instructive to see how far off he was. In the following, the first sentence after each number is Marx; the rest is my own observations.1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. This certainly has not taken place. The government controls vast tracts in the western United States, but much of this is provided to private users for a nominal fee. The Bundy family has become symbolic of the belief that *no* land should be devoted to public purposes; that private parties have a right to control as much land as they need, free of charge.2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. This is a feature of most developed countries. The income tax is the only tax that can easily be made progressive. Property tax, sales tax, and tariffs are flat taxes.3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. If anything, the more wealth a person has, the more of it they can transfer to their descendants.4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. Capital may be moved out of the U.S. at will, so this didn't come to pass. If "rebels" include criminals, asset forfeiture may count as confiscation of property.5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. Marx seems a little confused here. If private property is abolished, there's no need for anyone to borrow capital. The only investment would be the State funding its own projects, not handing money over to entrepreneurs to build their own businesses. As it turned out, we have Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Small Business Administration overseeing lending by the State to private citizens for various purposes. Fiscal policy is set by the Federal Reserve, a quasi-governmental entity.6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. This turned out to be a state-funded infrastructure of roads and state regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum, with the actual movement of goods and information handled privately.7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. I would argue that this is essentially what happened; government contracting is an enormous sector of the economy, and development of wilderness areas has generally been carried out or at least funded and encouraged by the State.8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. The opposite is true; industry and agriculture are still firmly in the hands of the private sector, and it never occurred to Marx that the workers of London would eventually transition to the service and data industries, with production outsourced to foreign countries.9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. Again, the opposite took place, with increasing industrial specialization and a sharp divide between urban and rural. In the U.S., this is exemplified by largely Democratic, densely-populated cities surrounded by vast Republican countryside.10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c. One of the great achievements of American society has been its public school system; the idea that all children deserve an education regardless of wealth or class. A major debate is taking place as to whether this should be expanded to college. And child labor laws have largely eliminated the gross exploitation of children that was taken for granted in Marx' time.So as a predictor of society's future development, if I've added it up correctly, Marx is around 4.5 out of 10. He assumed that a highly developed and industrialized society like that of England would be the first to develop communism; he would have been very surprised to see it first implemented in an agrarian country like Russia. And far from the workers losing their chains, the history of communism in the 20th century was little more than a change from one authoritarian regime to another. In the end, the whole sordid edifice could be summed up by Whitman's lines from "Respondez!"Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling! Let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands!

Finally got around to reading this after years of reading quotes in a multitude of other books. I was shocked at how pie-in-the-sky it is. Marx's outlook seems extremely narrow-minded. He reminds me of a sophomoric young man and that this rant is a misapplication of his disgruntled soul. It's truly astounding that this screed was ever considered a significant work. It's almost as if his naivete is being used.