Publisher's Synopsis
Few political manifestos in the history of the world have sparked such conflict and division as the 1848 Communist Manifesto, jointly written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Its powerful message continues to resonate throughout society to the present day, and is thus worthy of study, even if only to dsicover first-hand what was said. The Communist Manifesto is a not uninteresting analytical approach to the class struggle and then-present) and the problems of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production-and not, as many think, a prediction of communism's potential future forms. Most significantly, a reading of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 reveals just how much present-day liberalism has taken over almost all the main ideological positions of Communism with regard to its insistence on total equality, irrelevant of hereditary or origin. This book details how these two thinkers believed that it was inevitable that the capitalist society of their time would eventually be replaced by socialism-a prediction which has, despite the nightmare of the Soviet Union era, has come true to a surprisingly large degree. Most societies today, for example, contain varying degrees of socialist enterprises-even the USA, supposedly the most "capitalist" society on earth, has state-owned enterprises (the USPS, Medicaid, Medicare, and numerous others).
