Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx: Communist Manifesto (2012, Yale University Press)
229 pages
Langue : English
Publié 16 juillet 2012 par Yale University Press.
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
Ca fait longtemps que je l'ai lu, et à l'époque je m'étais dit qu'il fallais le remettre a jour car peu représentatif du monde actuel avec cette classe moyenne apathique. Mais les IA vont voler les jobs de cette classe moyenne donc c'est bon dans 20 ans ça sera de nouveau d'actualité
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 …
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.
glad to have read it.
