The Communist Manifesto
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4.5 • 24 Ratings
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Publisher Description
It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League's purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.
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.
Customer Reviews
Brief criticism of The Communist Manifesto
In this book, Marx and Engels declare support for the working class, or proletarians, and turn against the capitalists, or the bourgeoise. However, they are unable to provide an unbiased view and go so far as to critique even the smallest of a humanitarian attempt by any member of the bourgeoise, looking at it with extreme scepticism and disdain; they see it as an attempt to appease proletarians into accepting the current disparate system as it is.
Overall, the critique of the world provided in the book, is extremely utopian and somewhat dysfunctional, given how it is based on assumption after assumption of the nature of people in bourgeois society, and of the those in proletariat.
It does however, provide a lens from which to look at capitalism with, where it acknowledges however subtly that capitalism is the most efficient means of production. However, contradictions also exist where even though Marx and Engels are calling on proletarians from all over the world to unite, they are still highly ethnocentric in their views and as is clear from the text, assume western culture to be superior to other cultures.
On the whole, I felt the book lacked a true understanding of human nature, and the integrity and objectivity, necessary to validate any academic work. So where the book does contribute somewhat in that it helps us focus on the system of capitalism, it also fails to provide a true understanding of the world, and sensible predictions of any world system that is to replace capitalism in future.