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muhannaln's review against another edition
3.0
بكل صراحة ما احس فهمت شيء غير اهمية توزيع الثروات لماركس ولا شيء كذاك. برجع له الكتاب في يوم آخر ان شاء الله.
mmsequeira's review against another edition
The Communist manifesto by Karl Marx (1998)
bashbashbashbash's review against another edition
No rating, because one of the things I discovered, while listening to the audio version of this book (because that's what I do now, I guess), is that I know so very little about history that it's difficult-to-impossible for me to mentally situate half of Marx's statements in historical context. This is a net good for me, because I'm going to read more history and philosophy as a result, but probably of little or no interest to you. Moving along.
Basically what I gleaned was: Marx has lots of valid critiques of capitalism, and of those who critique capitalism yet benefit from it. It's hard to argue with "child labor is bad," and I tend to agree with Marx's overall leftism (obvs). Get the government to run trains and the post office and things. Sounds good to me. The thing about getting rid of inheritance is that if the state runs well, there is access to decent food, shelter, medical care, education, etc. for all members of the state, and so on, there is no real need for inheritance, landlords became irrelevant, etc. (Abolition of inheritance is one of the top things that those Founding Fathers – or as my partner calls them, "the founding daddies" – were all about. Obviously America hasn't eliminated inheritance.)
The essay "The King of Prussia" had lots of good points, especially about the hypocrisy of systems that have significant class inequalities. Marx comments that there is an urging toward charity because there is too little charity; and when charity fails to fix the larger structural inequalities, there is an outcry of too much charity. In this case, one of the primary systems Marx critiques is that of 19th Century England – one small epoch of history that I have some oblique understanding of; hooray. This portion of the essay is troublingly relevant to 20th and 21st Century America.
Returning to the Manifesto: there are things here that Marx gets wrong. For example, "Confiscation of all property of all emigrants and rebels," which we have seen play out IRL, is... not so great. Of course, it's weird to compare the Manifesto and essays to countries under so-called Communist governments, since of all the Communist governments that I know of, none of managed to actually be governed by the proletariat. Most people continued to have little control over their own labor or the system of labor, which is the opposite of Marx's vision of Communism.
Of the material I felt I properly understood (which, again, was limited), I had two significant disagreements. Both my issues regarded the statement about Communism eliminating morality and religion. Communism doesn't eliminate morality because morality is baked into the Manifesto; Marx's implication is that the Proletariat has an inherent morality that will create a utopian society. Assuming that any social group (dominant or oppressed) will behave with superior (or inferior) morality simply because they're a group just doesn't quite work. Social groupings are very important, and shape our lives, but they don't form a great basis for assigning absolute moralities. By creating a system of implicit morality, Marx bungles some of his own good work.
My complaint about the bit about doing away with religion is that Communism doesn't successfully purge the elements – good and bad – of religious behavior. It only shifts the object of those beliefs (and not always that, of course). Also, in practice this led to already persecuted religious groups being further oppressed (which I don't think was Marx's intention, but like I said, I literally know nothing).
Basically what I gleaned was: Marx has lots of valid critiques of capitalism, and of those who critique capitalism yet benefit from it. It's hard to argue with "child labor is bad," and I tend to agree with Marx's overall leftism (obvs). Get the government to run trains and the post office and things. Sounds good to me. The thing about getting rid of inheritance is that if the state runs well, there is access to decent food, shelter, medical care, education, etc. for all members of the state, and so on, there is no real need for inheritance, landlords became irrelevant, etc. (Abolition of inheritance is one of the top things that those Founding Fathers – or as my partner calls them, "the founding daddies" – were all about. Obviously America hasn't eliminated inheritance.)
The essay "The King of Prussia" had lots of good points, especially about the hypocrisy of systems that have significant class inequalities. Marx comments that there is an urging toward charity because there is too little charity; and when charity fails to fix the larger structural inequalities, there is an outcry of too much charity. In this case, one of the primary systems Marx critiques is that of 19th Century England – one small epoch of history that I have some oblique understanding of; hooray. This portion of the essay is troublingly relevant to 20th and 21st Century America.
Returning to the Manifesto: there are things here that Marx gets wrong. For example, "Confiscation of all property of all emigrants and rebels," which we have seen play out IRL, is... not so great. Of course, it's weird to compare the Manifesto and essays to countries under so-called Communist governments, since of all the Communist governments that I know of, none of managed to actually be governed by the proletariat. Most people continued to have little control over their own labor or the system of labor, which is the opposite of Marx's vision of Communism.
Of the material I felt I properly understood (which, again, was limited), I had two significant disagreements. Both my issues regarded the statement about Communism eliminating morality and religion. Communism doesn't eliminate morality because morality is baked into the Manifesto; Marx's implication is that the Proletariat has an inherent morality that will create a utopian society. Assuming that any social group (dominant or oppressed) will behave with superior (or inferior) morality simply because they're a group just doesn't quite work. Social groupings are very important, and shape our lives, but they don't form a great basis for assigning absolute moralities. By creating a system of implicit morality, Marx bungles some of his own good work.
My complaint about the bit about doing away with religion is that Communism doesn't successfully purge the elements – good and bad – of religious behavior. It only shifts the object of those beliefs (and not always that, of course). Also, in practice this led to already persecuted religious groups being further oppressed (which I don't think was Marx's intention, but like I said, I literally know nothing).
jameskemp's review
4.0
I read this when studying political economy at the University of Glasgow. It's a very interesting read and ought to be read by everyone. Communism is one of the world's common ideologies, so whether you agree with it or not you ought ot understand what it is all about.