Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)

Everything that seemed abstract and difficult to comprehend, is today clear. As we are living through yet another crisis of late capitalism, the sheer bestiality of the ruling class which clings to its privilege at the cost of billions of lives (and that's only human lives) is on spectacle for the most willfully blind to see.

The mass of wage earners is sinking so the rich could scale to some pharaonic height on their corpses. The system is crashing so badly it, as the Manifesto predicted, show more has to feed the slaves instead of being fed by it--and that's IF the rulers decide we should be alive at all. Won't robots soon turn out to be better consumers too?

Precarious jobs between no jobs resulting in nothing but precarious existence, billions of people hanging on threads while a small group in power tells them they are free--free for what, free how? We are only free to vote to keep the rich around.

Anyone who feels they have a stake in human society ought to read this. Anyone who thinks they are a humanist, a good and moral person, anyone who gives charity but is pro-capitalist, ought to read this.

It's a brilliant book and it's everything you need to begin to understand what must be done if we love life, if we love life in everything living. show less

I read this a while back to be edgy, but comrade’s got some points.

A lot of the critiques of capitalism are spot on, especially with the consequences like exploitation, and inequality. But the solutions and speculative vision of the future kinda flop in hindsight. Interesting to see how factors beyond class (like values shaped by history, religion, culture, etc.) have influenced different societies and resulted in mixed markets that Marx didn’t think of. Particularly when those factors show more steer voters away from policies correlated to improvements in their material well-being — which I think shows what Marx missed: that politics and history can’t be simplified to just class and power. They’re shaped by a bunch of other variables like identity, meaning, and personal narrative too.

Still cool to look back and see what still stands and how these ideas changed humanity. show less

This new year, 2017, is the centennial anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which more than any other historical event ushered in Communism as a global political force. It will lead – probably closer to October – to a lot of spilt newspaper ink about whether this is a worthy event to mark. Surely there is nothing to 'celebrate' in an event which led to many millions of deaths? One which was soundly defeated by events of the 20th century, a century which established globalism and show more capitalism – or, if you're the sentimental type, democracy and freedom – as the dominant forces in world politics?

At the nucleus of this debate is this wafer-thin pamphlet written and published in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This really set the ball rolling which was later picked up, with varying degrees of success, by the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Hardly distinguished company, but I'll get onto that later. For you see, the year of political upheaval we've just had in 2016 – Brexit, Trump and the wave of what is outrageously dismissed as 'populism' – is a useful period in which to remind ourselves of the popular European revolutions of 1848 which encouraged the distribution of The Communist Manifesto.

To my great surprise, there was a lot in the initial parts of the pamphlet that made sense. Marx and Engels make stark declarations about the rapacious elements of capitalism which serve to deny and diminish working men – that you exist only insofar as you are a useful part of the machine; that big business has disturbing influence over the political system; that workers are exploited not only by their employers but by the attendant bottom-feeders like landlords and retailers. This disillusionment and anger at modern industrial society that Marx and Engels identify will no doubt still be felt by anyone who is forced to work in its exhausting restraints. The pamphleteers severely criticise free trade, globalization and the indignity of the 'forgotten' working class; messages that will not be lost on those who followed the rise of Trump in the US election. When the pamphlet points out that the profit-seeking capitalist society can only exist by constantly reinventing itself, and therefore society (pg. 6), it provides insight into modern workers' distress at the ever-changing restlessness of modern life. It captures many of the frustrations and discontent of those (many, many) people who lose in the capitalist game. If Marx was disturbed in 1848, you can only wonder at how appalled he would be in this modern world of banker bailouts, tax-dodging politicians, sweatshop labour, university graduates on unpaid internships and zero-hour contracts, extortionate rents on London bedsits, climate change exacerbated by industrial activity, and the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.

But then: oh, dear. After capturing with a real sense of catharsis the frustrations of the working-class in a society where the dice are not only loaded but fired point-blank in the faces of those who aspire to equality or parity, it all goes a bit wonky. Well, that's an understatement. It becomes terrible. I would use 'laughably terrible' if not for all the disastrous and unhilarious consequences Marx's conclusions birthed, not only in body count but for future prospects of remedy. For you see, after all his sound observations about the plight of the working class, Marx's conclusions are woeful. Having sounded prescient and progressive in identifying the inconsistencies of modern capitalist economies, he then responds exactly as you would expect a 19th-century German to respond. He calls for the "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions" (pg. 52) and declares that "the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement" against the existing order (pg. 51), essentially a blanket support of anarchism, war and political bloodletting. He says communism needs must allow for "despotic inroads" to achieve its ends, with different measures for different countries (pg. 33). This is extraordinarily naïve, with its support of political violence and its open-ended claims of 'necessity' providing a blank cheque for dictators and other violent men. History of course proved this to be the case (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and so on and on and on) but it's not just 20-20 hindsight; it's glaringly obvious from any sober reading of the text.

The Communist Manifesto doesn't want to abolish the ruling class, only replace it with the proletariat as a new ruling class (pg. 33). It assures us that communists "have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole" (pg. 21) which, to put it mildly, asks a lot of people's integrity. It assures us that when in power, the magnanimous proletariat will lose its political character (pg. 34), which is astonishingly naïve – as if swords would be beat into ploughshares. It is wishful thinking, open only to the potential for appalling abuse. It ignores the addictiveness of power, and the fact that its open-ended theorising allows wiggle room for any dictator to claim 'the revolution is not yet complete' and a further period of oppression is 'necessary' (side note: we're seeing it in Venezuela now, and George Orwell skewered this tendency brilliantly in Animal Farm). It divides people into segments and classes (a precursor of the insidious modern left-wing obsession with labels and identity politics), saying that a man who exists outside class or his economic situation is a "philosophical fantasy" (pg. 41). It is an us-vs-them doctrine that led to millions of unnecessary deaths.

You might think such criticism is old hat. Communism is done, you say. If, as I suggested in my introduction, it has been defeated, then why do I even bother? Well, it's anger on my part. Because the problems that Marx and Engels identify in the early parts of the pamphlet are real and alive – even more alive and thriving now in 2017 than they were in 1917 or 1848. On page 42, Marx criticises previous failed attempts at socialism as providing "a welcome scarecrow" for the ruling classes to paint communism as a threat. But his own hyperbolic contribution – his exhortations to divisiveness and violence and despotism – made the real economic and social inequalities he witnessed that much harder to solve, by crowding out those who might actually have done some good. Marx and his adherents (some well-meaning, some not-so-well-meaning) probably set the causes and achievements of economic equality and social mobility back by centuries. That's why I'm so contemptuous. If Marx is good at identifying problems, he's bad at providing remedy. He offers not a single conceivable or workable solution in this manifesto, only a vague platitudinal call to 'unite'. To be fair, maybe he's more sober in his other works (I've not read them), but here he doesn't want to solve problems, to build; he only wants to burn it down, overthrow, revolt, and replace it with some nebulous utopian idea of something 'better'. It's like finding out your ship is sinking but rather than trying to plug the leak you resolve to teach those aboard to breathe like a fish. It identifies problems of human dignity – working like cogs in a machine, without real economic prospects or hope of change, under greedy profit-chasers – and stupidly thinks the solutions are to be found in some of the even less edifying human characteristics, like violence and destruction and groupthink. The late, great Leonard Cohen once said that those who create the bonfire should also create the piss. Marx and Engels don't do that – they only provide more petrol. I don't have the hubris to claim to be able to put out their fire, but I can – in my own small way – piss all over it. show less

This is a pretty batshit book because it manages to somehow be genuinely uplifing (for workers, at any rate) while describing in stomach-turning detail working and living conditions that beggar belief. Deformed spines, crippled children, faeces every which way. And while banging on in equally horrific detail about prices and shillings and potatoes. Engels makes it his mission to validate entirely matter-of-factly the lived experiences of British workers, no holds barred.

The treatment of show more workers as no different from the machines they find themselves with no choice but to operate should sound alarm bells with the slow but steady introduction of barely functional AI chatbots into the workplace, with AI destroying previously safe tech jobs, and with recent news from the U.S. about Unelected Musk's feeding AI with citizens' private data to analyse what cuts should be made in the "people's" government.

Still, workers are patronised for worrying that snowballing technological advances may make their lives worse, for example in rendering their jobs either unnecessary or downright mind-numbing. Still, "vampiric property-holders" choose to leave tenants to rot in mouldy, leaking, overcrowded hovels far beyond what the law permits, despite the law permitting much. And the condescending cruelties of well-meaning "Liberals" and "Tories" alike are as stifling for workers' self expression as ever, there's just less human shit in the streets. show less