The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, Joesph Engels

>This commentary will be in 3 parts. It is unavoidably political. Read with an open mind. Faint of heart, hold on to your copy of Going Rogue while you read. (I want to comment on that in a few weeks too).

Published 1848 originally in German and famously never read. It is Not really worth the read. I felt it was a rambling screed of self-obsessed malcontents angry at modern society. They complained though out about the rise of the nation state. Somehow it was unfair that people had acquired private property, some more than others. They complained about the oppression and exploitation of the workers. They seemed to look back to the good old days of Feudalism. This was mentioned several times. It was amazing in its self-delusion. They wanted to remove the bourgeois owners of everything and replace them with the Proletariat. This was violently accomplished and it is funny because, the Proletariat Elite (especially Stalin) simply replaced the bourgeois elites and the workers were still serfs; still owning no property. If that were only enough, the new ruling elite in the Soviet Union killed over 25 million people. I include several quotes from the book.

“Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. “

They advocate in unmistakable clarity their goals of complete dissolution of all ownership of private property, the destruction of the family unit and the annihilation of religion. This was unambiguously repeated.

Part 2 coming up.