The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
Channel: International Relations & Politics
Date: 27/01/2022

The introduction begins: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre."

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO - FULL AudioBook - by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels | 

The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is an 1848 pamphlet by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel.
The three main ideas from The Communist Manifesto are class conflict, ephemeral capitalism, and inevitable revolution. Marx and Engel focused on class conflict as the driving force for their argument.

The bourgeoisie were revolutionary in the sense that they represented a radical change in the structure of society. In Marx's words, “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (Marx and Engels 1848).

Definition. Class struggle happens when the bourgeoisie (the rich) pay the proletariat (the workers) to make things for them to sell. The workers have no say in their pay or what things they make, since they cannot live without a job or money. Karl Marx saw that the workers had to work without any say in the business.

The Communist Manifesto was conceived as an outline of the basic beliefs of the Communist movement. The authors believed that the European Powers were universally afraid of the nascent movement, and were condemning as "communist," people or activities that did not actually conform to what the Communists believed. This Manifesto, then, became a manual for their beliefs.

In it we find Marx and Engel's rehearsal of the idea that Capital has stolen away the work of the artisan and peasant by building up factories to produce goods cheaply. The efficiency of Capital depends, then, on the wage laborers who staff the factories and how little they will accept in order to have work. This concentrates power and money in a Bourgeois class that profits from the disunity of workers (Proletarians), who only receive a subsistence wage.

Section 1 - Bourgeois and Proletarians by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels -- 00:00:00

Section 2 - Proletarians and Communists by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels -- 00:36:00

Section 3 - Socialist & Communist Literature; & Section 4 - Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels -- 00:59:23

If workers unite in a class struggle against the bourgeois, using riot and strikes as weapons, they will eventually overthrow the bourgeois and replace them as a ruling class. Communists further believe in and lay out a system of reforms to transform into a classless, stateless society, thus distinguishing themselves from various flavors of Socialism, which would be content to have workers remain the ruling class after the revolution.

The Manifesto caused a huge amount of discussion for its support for a forcible overthrow of the existing politics and society.