People with authoritarian tendencies will never come out and directly say that they want to run your life.
by John Keller
Partially Educated
The Communist Manifesto is one of those documents I was aware of, but had never taken the time to actually read. As a woefully undereducated product of the public education system, I somehow managed to slip by the class that required reading of the old Marx and Engels classic. So, in the course of continuing liberty self-education, I found a translation on the web in order to better understand this failed canon of anti-freedom. My reaction: wow. The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, looks a lot like the Democratic Party Positions, written in 2000.
The Pseudo-History of Class Warfare
The first chapter of the Manifesto is a rambling pseudo-history that rails against the bourgeois as the historically re-incarnated oppressors vis-à-vis the continually oppressed proletariat. I was reminded of the slave reparations, minority oppression, women oppression, and other Democratic Party class based arguments. The second chapter is a lengthy list of “Bourgeois” complaints against the generally perceived Communist aims, and the communist response to them. Among the Bourgeois complaints the manifesto defends are: abolition of family, abolition of religion, socialization of education, and abolition of nations. Does this remind us of current complaints within the political system? Interestingly, the manifesto presents the following observation regarding the abolition of nations: