Paperback, 288 pages
English language
Published Aug. 27, 2002 by Penguin Books.
A rousing call to arms whose influence is still felt today
Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom.
This new edition includes an extensive introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, Britain's leading expert on Marx and Marxism, providing a complete course for students of The Communist Manifesto, and demonstrating not only the historical importance of the text, but also its place in the world today.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. …
A rousing call to arms whose influence is still felt today
Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom.
This new edition includes an extensive introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, Britain's leading expert on Marx and Marxism, providing a complete course for students of The Communist Manifesto, and demonstrating not only the historical importance of the text, but also its place in the world today.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
I think it's pretty good. It's pretty polemical and lays out the political goals of communists, it doesn't really get into Marxist philosophy and the methods in which Marx comes to his conclusions though. I'd probably recommend "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" as a better introduction to Marxism.
The manifesto is mostly just interesting as a historical piece for me, especially in terms of leftist history. Ideologically it's still pretty interesting to read, however some parts of it have naturally become a bit outdated which has even been acknowledged by Marx and Engels some 25 years later.
The edition of the manifesto I read even includes multiple prefaces by Engels throughout the years which further gave an amazing insight into history and what they felt and thought at the time. Additionally the book also included Engel's The Principles of Communism which practically functioned as an FAQ to fully illustrate what exactly Communism is and it stands for.
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.
