The Communist Manifesto Review

Recommended: 3/5

I've heard a lot about the communist manifesto my whole life but never finished reading it. I found it fairly disappointing. There are many books by Marx which make a very convincing case for socialism, such as Das Kapital, but this is not one of them.

The manifesto is an outline of Marx's plan to bring about socialism. He outlines the different factions of socialists, bourgeois, and explains his program to create the worker state. Reading it made me recall interesting parallels with modern political movements that I'm very familiar with (such as the libertarian movement).

At a certain point, Marx writes about his plans for the family under the proletariat dictatorship. He explains that the bourgeois understanding of the family reduces all transactions to economics, and that the family must be destroyed. Interestingly enough, all modern socialist states have done just this.

I also found Marx's writings on property to be insightful. Marx explains that he isn't against property per say, and that he only opposes "bourgeois property." He justifies the expropriation of the bourgeoisie because they, at one point, stole their property from the old aristocracy and feudal serfs.

Ultimately, I found that the Communist Manifesto did not live up to its reputation as one of the greatest literary works of the 19th century.