The Communist Manifesto
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Featuring an extensive, provocative introduction by historian Martin Malia, this authorized English translation of The Communist Manifesto, edited and annotated by Engels, with prefaces to editions published between 1872 and 1888, provides a new opportunity to examine the document that shook the world.
In 1848, two young men published what would become one of the defining documents of modern history, The Communist Manifesto. It rapidly realigned political faultlines all over the world and its aftershock resonates to this day. In the many years since its publication, no other social program has inspired such divisive and violent debate. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world’s first regime to adopt the Manifesto’s tenets, historians have debated its intent and its impact. In the current era of market democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe, nationalism on every continent, and an ever tightening global economy, does the specter of Communism still haunt the world? Were the seeds of Communism’s ultimate destruction already planted in 1848? Is there anything to be learned from Marx’s envisioned utopia?
With an Introduction by Martin Malia
and an Afterword by Stephen Kotkin
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rowson (The Wasteland), a political cartoonist whose scabrous style can be traced right back to Ralph Steadman, has produced a funny and nightmarishly dark graphic adaptation of communism's foundational document. Rowson reimagines the book as a kind of lecture, with the bearded authors Marx with a cigar in his hand and a cynical smirk on his face, Engels holding a great red flag yet to be unfurled strolling through a hellish landscape in which demonic steampunk machines grind up hapless proletarians into grist for the capitalist mill. At one point, Marx lectures in a "Kapitalist Komedy Club" open-mic night. Though the backdrops, with their Pink Floyd's The Wall aesthetic, can distract, this adaptation admirably boils down Marx's history lessons and luridly illustrates the warning that the bourgeoisie class produces "its own grave-diggers." While the book takes Marx's assumptions about the inevitability of a vast proletarian uprising at face value, it also includes a wry coda on the aftermath of Marx-inspired revolutions. The result is a jauntily irreverent but fundamentally serious take on a vastly influential political work.
