preview

Communist Manifesto Essay

Good Essays

The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto is too long to be a concise declaration of principles and too short to be a book. It is comprised of about 17,000 words including various introductions by Friedrich Engels.
It is arranged, basically, in four sections. The first section introduces the Marxian idea of history as a class struggle. It juxtaposes the conditions and development of various strata of society, "freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf...in a word, oppressor and oppressed." It hypothesizes how the development of each of these in history gave rise to the next step in an inevitable historical process culminating ultimately in the rise of one working class.
Marx and Engels put forward the …show more content…

One class always exploited the other because their interests were always diametrically opposed. As the lower class gained power a new class would arise that would eventually subsume the old upper class. Thus a kind of dialectical (two opposites producing a unified whole) process would create a merchant class and a working class from the struggle between the peasant and the nobility.
But Marx felt that there was an end to this process. At some point the working class would eliminate all the remaining classes. If there was only one class, there would no longer be a class struggle. There would no longer be a need for all the trappings of class warfare such as money, nation-states and governments.
This quasi-Hegelian view of history would color all of Marx's philosophy and would influence the entire Communist Manifesto (which would in turn influence generations of radicals). It was an idea that gave history the air of inevitability. Marx and Engels actually believed that they had discovered a scientific truth that could be applied in a scientific manner to the affairs of humanity.
It has been over 150 years since the publication of the Communist Manifesto and the declaration has proved to be hollow in that many of its predictions have not been born out by actual history. There are many arguments as

Get Access