The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1931859256
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“What is globalization? Here is one of the best answers. It is the ‘constant revolutionizing of production’ and the ‘endless disturbance of all social conditions.’ It is ‘everlasting uncertainty.’ Everything ‘fixed and frozen’ is ‘swept away,’ and ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ Yes, you have read this before. It is from The Communist Manifesto, by Messrs. Marx and Engels.”—The New York Times
Here, at last, is an authoritative introduction to history’s most important political document, with the full text of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels.
This beautifully organized and presented edition of The Communist Manifesto is fully annotated, with clear historical references and explication, additional related texts, and a glossary that will bring the text to life for students, as well as the general reader.
Since it was first written in 1848, the Manifesto has been translated into more languages than any other modern text. It has been banned, censored, burned, and declared “dead.” But year after year, the text only grows more influential, remaining required reading in courses on philosophy, politics, economics, and history.
“Apart from Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species,” notes the Los Angeles Times, the Manifesto “is arguably the most important work of nonfiction written in the 19th century.” The Washington Post calls Marx “an astute critic of capitalism.” Writing in The New York Times, Columbia University Professor Steven Marcus describes the Manifesto as a “masterpiece” with “enduring insights into social existence.”
The New Yorker recently described Karl Marx as “The Next Thinker” for our era. This book will show readers why.
Phil Gasper is a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University in northern California. He writes extensively on politics and the philosophy of science and is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch.
As Free and as Just as Possible: The Theory of Marxian Liberalism (Blackwell Public Philosophy)
Introduction to the Philosophy of History : with selections from The Philosophy of Right
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford World's Classics)
The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (Routledge Classics)
and thus the end of class distinctions themselves. When this point is reached, there will be no more social classes, no more state (in the sense of a set of institutions that enforce the rule of one class), and no more politics (in the sense of a struggle between different classes). The members of such a society would be able to settle their differences through genuine democratic discussion, debate, and decision making. 74. Marx and Engels place individual freedom at the center of their vision of
OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! 89 concluded that even the struggle for democratic rights had to be led by the proletariat, and that a bourgeois-democratic revolution would be part of a single process culminating in a socialist revolution. This is the theory of “permanent revolution,” later associated with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, but advocated first by Marx and Engels.31 8. Socialists support all progressive movements, whether or not those movements have socialist politics. Compare II.5.
of communist common ownership? Or on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development. Karl Marx & Frederick Engels January 21, 1882, London
1850, the German text had been reprinted several times in Switzerland, England, and America. In 1872, it was translated into English in New York, where the translation was published in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. From this English version, a French one was made in Le Socialiste of New York. Since then, at least two more English translations, more or less mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin,
despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief. The Revolution of 1830, resulting in the transfer of government from the landlords to the capitalists, transferred it from the more remote to the more direct antagonists of the working men. The bourgeois republicans, who, in the name of the February Revolution, took the state power, used it for the June [1848] massacres, in