Penguin Great Ideas : The Communist Manifesto [Paperback]

Being a firm believer in only arguing on subjects you know about, I had hoped that this edition of the Communist Manifesto would fire up the old brain cells and be enjoyable as well. Unfortunatly, it seems that Penguin decided to try and bamboozle as many people as possible.

The slim volume is mostly taken up with introductions to every Eastern European edition printed and a separate piece by Karl Marx which was not part of the original Manifesto. The Manifesto istelf is only a few pages long - fair enough, seing as how it was only ever intended to be a pamphlet, not a book to be shown off and admired. But the revolutionary text which shaped so much of the modern world is sandwiched between repetition and ramblings, with no hint of Russian or Chinese background, no annotation and no mention of the impact these few pages had on society, save for a brief mention by Engels in one of the later prefaces.

The Manifesto is very interesting to read with hindsight, and makes some cohesive and thought-inducing points about the distribution of power in society, but as a whole is quite idealistic and unpractical, making it quite heavy-going.

Interesting when read as a supplement to prior knowledge about the politcal climates of the early 20th century, this edition of the Communist Manifesto is useful for scholars and those who can concentrate, simplify, think and criticize at the same time.

I'm not a scholar so don't expect a discussion on the various political and social viewpoints upon the text, and I haven't read this for any school paper or course assessment, I've read it because these 50 pages had an enormous impact upon our world and I've always wanted to find out why.

I read this in the form of the "Penguin Great Ideas" series which I take umbrage at mostly because the "Communist Manifesto" is not a "Great Idea" it's a stupid one for many reasons.

Marx and Engels take the position that globalisation is bad, that the spread of trade and free exchange of ideas is bad as it means people aren't satisfied with the old way of doing things now that they get exposed to new ways. They don't like technology taking the luddite position that it makes everything worse. They believe it makes workers redundant and take less joy in their work. Before I go any further, does anyone agree with this nonsense? It's like they want to freeze time indefinitely, they're anti-progress. So far, so dumb.

Their anti-machine spiel continues as they fume that the bourgeois are in control of the machines and therefore the direction the world is taking. They want the working class to control this instead. So it's just one group of society jealous of what another group of society have. Nothing revolutionary here.

I had to include this quote from the manifesto as I found it ironic - "He (the working man) becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him." Ironic as they claim this is the state of the working man under bourgeois rule but this is ultimately what would happen to countless millions under communist rule in the 20th century.

The manifesto contains largely sweeping statements that aren't backed up with examples or facts, and bizarre statements about the communist utopia that go along the lines of "if everyone were communist then there would be no competition and nobody would be better and so there would be no war". There's a lot of this anti-competition in the manifesto too as apparently we should all be equal and competition means some would be better than others. And don't forget the even weirder stuff about all private property is abolished, those so-called reasons behind that make no sense at all.

I think besides the idealistic posturing, behind which there are no practicalities for how to bring it about, I mean who is to oversee that everyone does a certain job or where all products of production are directed, etc etc, there is very little of substance. But then it's aimed at the working classes who, especially at this time in the mid-19th century, they were very poorly educated if at all, and so they wouldn't have the mental tools to dissect the propaganda and lack of pragmatic thinking that the manifesto contains, they would simply swallow the message of "bourgeois bad, working class good, we will make the working class have better living standards".

And ultimately the manifesto was used as a tool for a whole new group of people to enslave the same people while taking the wealth for themselves. Look at the legacy that the 20th century left us - two failed ideologies, fascism and communism. And yet when you look at the two, in practice they weren't that different. Communist Russia, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, all became totalitarian regimes under the guise that they were doing it all for the working man. That may not have been Marx and Engels' plan but that was certainly what happened and their convincing (to others, I certainly wasn't convinced by any of the empty arguments) arguments led millions of people to their deaths and inadvertently changed the world for the worse, hence my view that "The Communist Manifesto" is manifestly not a great idea. Their utopia was like all utopias, a mirage and nothing more.

As for the rest of the manifesto, it talks a lot about different kinds of communists which was dull, it repeats the word "bourgeois" far too often (but then this is a propaganda leaflet so they had to hammer home the message that property and individual freedoms are bad), but there are moments of strangely poetic writing such as "the robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe..." (p.42).

I found it quite a chore to read but necessary as it's a document that has had an inordinate amount of impact on our world and it's communist ideas continue to brainwash the people of North Korea and Cuba (both third world countries led by dictators). I'm glad I read it too because I learned that sometimes ideas that are meant to beneficial to mankind can be subverted by others to exploit people and change the stated purpose to something completely different, like Nietzsches' "Superman" theory and Hitler's Nazi party.

It's an interesting historical document, competently written, but don't expect revelations in the text or well thought out ideas. What you'll find inside are idealism, strange rhetoric, character assassination, and a lack of coherent thinking - in short, propaganda, nothing more.

If you are in any way interested in C19th intellectual thinking then this is a must read. And when you have finished it, think of today's economic climate and wonder 'what if?' In theory Marx and Engels seem to present us with the blueprint for the ideal society; in practice, however, it may be nigh on impossible to implement successfully