synopsis:

The Communist Manifesto opens with the famous words "The history of all hitherto societies has been the history of class struggles," and proceeds in the next 41 pages to elaborate this proposition. In section 1, "Bourgeois and Proletarians," Marx delineates his vision of history, focusing on the development and eventual destruction of the bourgeoisie, the dominant class of his day. Before the bourgeoisie rose to prominence, society was organized according to a feudal order run by aristocratic landowners and corporate guilds. This bourgeois ascendancy has, though, created a new social class which labor in the new bourgeois industries. This class, the proletariat, "wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live," are the necessary consequence of bourgeois modes of production. As bourgeois industries expand and increase their own capital, the ranks of the proletariat swell as other classes of society, artisans and small business owners, cannot compete with the bourgeois capitalists.

In Chapter 2, "Proletariats and Communists," Marx elaborates the social changes communists hope to effect on behalf of the proletariat. he notes firstly that the interests of communists do not differ from the interests of the proletariat as a class; they seek only to develop a class consciousness in the proletariat, a necessary condition of eventual proletariat emancipation. The primary objective of communists and the revolutionary proletariat is the abolition of private property, for it is this that keeps them enslaved. Bourgeois economics, i.e., capitalism, requires that the owners of the means of production compensate workers only enough to ensure their mere physical subsistence and reproduction. In other words, the existence of bourgeois property, or capital as Marx calls it, relies on its radically unequal distribution. The only way the proletariat can free itself from bourgeois exploitation is to abolish capitalism. In achieving this goal, the proletariat will destroy all remnants of bourgeois culture which act to perpetuate, if even implicitly, their misery.

Chapter 3, "Socialist and Communist Literature," encompasses Marx's discussion of the relationship between his movement and previous or contemporaneous socialist movements. In this chapter he repudiates these other movements for not fully understanding the significance of the proletarian struggle.

The final chapter, "Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties," announces the communist intention to "everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things". As Marx says in conclusion, "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" (121).

on this book:

The Manifesto has lived a long and illustrious life. While it was hardly noticed amongst the crowded field of pamphlets and treatises published in 1848, it has had a more profound effect on the intellectual and political history of the world than any single work in the past 150 years. It has inspired the communist political systems which ruled nearly half the world's population at its height and defined the chief ideological conflict of the second half of the twentieth century, altering even those countries which stood firmly against communism, e.g. Western European and American Welfare States.

Intellectually, Marx's work has profoundly influenced nearly every field of study from the humanities to the social sciences to the natural sciences. It is hard to imagine an area of serious human inquiry which Marxism has not touched. As Marx said: "The philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways. What matters is changing it."