The book is The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This translation was first published by Samuel Moore in 1888. Published in Penguin Books in 1967. I read the 2002 Penguin Classics edition. I read it in September of 2024.
The title is the thesis of the book. It is the official declaration of what it means to be a communist. Or at least what Marx and Engels intended by the term. They wrote it for their communist party as the manifesto of what defines them. I guess even back then there was disagreement about what exactly it meant to be a communist. They weren’t so afraid of labels back then.
I read this book because I want to understand the enemy. And yes, I consider communists to be my enemy. I discriminate against it. Communism is antithetical to the Christian and American mindset. You’re either for us or against us and if you’re a communist then you’re against us. That is not the American way nor should it be the way for any country to operate.
I read this because I want to steel-man my opposition. I want to hear it straight from them what they believe. The most useless way to argue against something is to attack a strawman. The problem is, in many situations when you’re arguing with someone, they’ll constantly deflect and dodge and say well that’s not really what I believe. Or that’s not real communism, or atheism, or evolution or whatever it is you’re arguing against.
The same happens with me too. Someone will be arguing against Christianity and they’ll say something about Catholicism. And then I have to explain that I’m not a Catholic and I also vehemently disagree with Catholics. I appreciate it when my opponent understands that I’m a reformed protestant Christian. In fact it garners a lot of good faith with me if they even know what those terms mean. It shows they’ve done their homework and are more likely to have a good-faith conversation. That’s my aim in reading literature from an opposing worldview.
Communist is one of those political words that gets thrown around and most people don’t know what it really even means or the history of it. Like Fascist, or hippy, or conservative. They get used so often in our culture that most of us are merely working on context clues as to what these words mean.
Also, it’s so satisfying when you’re arguing with someone and you’ve done more reading on the literature from their side then they have. That’s why I read this book. Because I want to be more thoroughly equipped than my communist opponent. Nothing shuts down someone’s argument faster than when you use their own material against them. Because then if they disagree with it they’re disagreeing with their own side. And it shows that they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s so good.
Essentially what Marx and Engels are saying in this book is what they believe the term communist means. It means the abolition of private property. Privately owned capital in the form of land or property or wealth is bad.
Marx and Engels split people into two groups. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are the wealthy capital and private property owners and the proletariat are the working class poor people. The bourgeoisie are the oppressors and the proletariat are the oppressed. The bourgeoisie are only in the position of power because they have exploited the proletariat. All wealth and power are gained by exploitation of the powerless or disenfranchised. There is a class struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed.
Something that surprised me from this book is how much I agreed with Marx’s assessment of some of the effects of the industrial revolution. He writes about how the industrial revolution removed men from the production of their hard work.
When the factories and plants of the industrial revolution were created, men went from farming their own food and raising their own livestock to working in the factories or mines. They left their homes and started working for a company. This inevitably resulted in them becoming cogs in a machine. Marx emphasizes that.
It’s a terrible thing that men have become widgets of other men’s production. I actually agree with that. And there has been a large amount of exploitation of workers from bad capitalists.
Wages were low and work was hazardous. The capitalist counter to this would be to say that the workers are paid a wage. If they don’t like it they don’t have to work there. This may be true now but what about at the beginning of the industrial revolution? How many options did a man have? And what about the men who didn’t have farms and homesteads they could work? For a young man with no family or prospects, a factory could’ve been a great benefit to get money and get started in life. Life was hard all around in the 19th century.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that this observation of exploited workers is something “right” about communism. It’s a diagnoses or criticism of the way things were that I agree with. It’s common that diagnoses of problems in the world can be accurately examined by someone. But then their remedy to the situation is abysmal. That’s certainly true of communism.
Another problem that I think Marx rightly identifies is the issue of skilled laborers being competed out of the market because the advancement of technology and their skills no longer being useful. It must be frustrating to have a skill that over time becomes no longer in demand. Saddle makers are priced out of the market by car manufacturers. But again, what’s the answer? Don’t invent cars? Stop progress and innovation? The communist might say yes. That’s because they’re thinking of economics from the demand side instead of the supply side.
Their thinking is to only provide what the people are demanding. But that’s not the best way to think about economics. If Henry Ford asked what the people wanted they would’ve said faster horses. Creativity and innovation in business and industry is crucial to the flourishing of humanity. But what do you say to the truck driver that gets replaced by self-driving cars? The cashier that gets replaced by the self-checkout machine? The lawyer that gets replaced by AI? Thems the breaks? Learn to code. Oh wait that’s being replaced by AI too.
What if the butcher loved his job and worked hard to carry on the family butcher shop? But then he can’t compete with the butcher factory. Is that just tough shit? That sucks. So he goes to work for the butcher factory and becomes a cog in a machine. I understand the frustration of that. I really do. But the answer cannot be the abolition of all private property as Marx suggests. The butcher being competed out of business is sad but it’s not a sin. Stealing from people and killing them if they don’t comply like Stalin and Mao did, that’s evil.
One of the goals of communism is to change the nature of man. One of the biggest problems of communist thinking is that it doesn’t deal with how men are, it deals with how they wish men could be. It tries to recreate man. They think that people are only the way we are because the society as made us this way.
If society changed then people would change. But the problem with this thinking is that society is made up of people. So what always ends up happening is a top-down forced change from the “wisest” among us who are ruling over everyone. The people are forced to change so that society will change so that people will change. It’s truly insane.
But the desire for re-creation of man makes sense. People do need to be made new. Reborn. But that only really happens in Christ. The communists understand the need for humanity to change, but they think it can happen through a political and economic revolution. That’s been proven to be a failure over and over but people still pursue it.
It’s hard to know where to begin when considering what’s wrong with communism. To begin with, the premise of grouping people into classes is a problem. People are more nuanced than that. To point to someone and just say bourgeois or proletariat is incredibly short sighted. How is that being determined? Whether or not someone owns property? And how are the oppressed being labeled? It’s too fatalistic. It assumes people have no agency. Is someone poor and “oppressed” or downtrodden strictly because they’re being oppressed? Does it never have anything to do with the decisions that person has made in their life? They’re only ever being exploited by the upper class? That’s a little too neat and tidy of an explanation. I have a hard time believing it’s always or even predominantly that cut and dry. This pigeonholing of people to begin with is incomplete at best.
Karl Marx dislikes that men are being used as widgets or cogs in a capitalistic machine but he’s perfectly fine with a man being such an automaton in his framework of the communist ideal. Marx is right, people aren’t widgets but that’s exactly why communism fails. A system of equal outcomes doesn’t work because people do not input equal efforts. Some people are smarter than others. Some people are more hardworking or talented than others. There is not equal input so there cannot be equal outcome. Not justly anyway.
The most devastating problem with communism is the Vanguard issue. The Vanguard Party was the group of communist revolutionaries in Lenin’s Russian Communist Revolution. The Vanguard party is responsible for educating the proletariat on communism and turning them into revolutionaries. The Vanguard party also guarded against what they considered counter-revolutionary threats. They are the ones that control the transition from the old capitalist/monarchical way into the new communist way.
Vanguard was Lenin’s interpretation of this sort of group of people. Mao had his Red Guard thugs. No matter what they’re called, a communist revolution requires a select few who are the “wisest” or “most intelligent,” the “experts” among the people to usher the society into the communist paradise. What this really means though is that they get to decide how much is equal and enough for everyone else to have. A goal of communism is for everyone to have what they need but the question is who gets to decide that for the people? How much is “enough?” And what if a person disagrees? Are they allowed to? The communist answer is no they’re not. The controlling Vanguard party becomes the new authoritarians and they get to decide what everyone needs or deserves. And loyalty to the movement becomes the new standard of good conduct. If anyone disagrees or even questions too much they’re thrown into Stalin’s gulag.
Who gets to decide what’s equal and enough for the people to have? It’s entirely materialistic. It’s all about the property. It’s all about the stuff. Some people have more stuff than other people and that’s not fair. So the communist authorities come in and make it fair, and they get to decide for everyone else what’s “fair.” That’s the problem with communism. There is no freedom for the individual to decide for themselves how many resources they need or want. The communist system always devolves into fascistic, authoritarian control of the people. It always has and always will. The communists are just as obsessed with property as they accuse the capitalists of being, the only difference is in who has the property.
From the introduction of the Penguin Classics edition Gareth Stedman Jones writes the following:
“conspirators who called themselves ‘the Equals’ had believed that popular sovereignty and a virtuous republic could never be secured while inequality remained. The corrupt government of Thermidor was therefore to be overthrown and replaced by an emergency ‘dictatorship’ of ‘wise men’ akin to the Committee for Public Safety that had presided over the Terror two years before. This body would expropriate the rich, take over the land and establish a community of goods before handing power back to the people as constituted within an egalitarian and democratic republic.” (p28)
There’s always that promise to hand over power back to the people just as soon as the transition is over. But power always seems to get stuck in the hands of the Vanguard party. It always happens that way.
What’s unique about communist authoritarianism is that it’s always disguised as benevolence. They don’t come right out and say “we want the power over you to control you.” It’s always in efforts of “public safety” or “helping others.” Besides isn’t that what Jesus would do? Help “the least of these.” But Christian charity is different than forced sharing. Stealing personal property from those who have more and giving it to those who did not work for it is not morally good. It’s stealing, which is a sin.
My main takeaway from this book is the origin of communism in Germany. It comes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s heretical ideas about Christianity. I have not read Hegel so I will tread lightly here, but apparently Hegel was seeking to replace Christianity with a post-Christian philosophy that metaphorized Christianity into some kind of philosophical pragmatism.
Hegel saw Christianity as important but didn’t believe in a literal Jesus Christ nor in the resurrection event in real human history. His new idea was one of “the absolute spirit.” Again, I haven’t read Hegel so I’m talking out of my ass a little bit here, but from what I can piece together, the idea of the absolute spirit is the idea that we are all connected in an intuitive way. Something like we are part of nature in like a larger cosmic consciousness. Like we humans are the way that the universe is conscious of itself. I don’t know. It sounds very Jordan Peterson/Joe Rogan-esque.
But one thing that Hegel was adamant about is that this philosophy could not be implemented in any practical political way into society. At least not without a violent revolution and even then it was dubious what would actually be achieved. But Marx came a long and was more open to rolling the dice on a violent revolution. Hegel was very much against this. Marx took Hegel’s post-Christian philosophy and put an economical class-based coat of paint on it and pursued a political practical manifestation of it, and that is what he called communism. I want to read Hegel but it sounds very intimidating.
The religious aspect of communism surprised me. It makes me rethink how to attack it. Instead of approaching it like an economic or political theory, we should be fighting it as a false religion. The problem is that most people don’t know the religious underpinnings of communism. They’ve done well in hiding that. So if we attack it as a false religion people won’t know what you’re talking about. It’s almost like arguing with a Mormon or Catholic. They usually don’t know the doctrines of their faith. So you almost have to convert them to Mormonism first and then dismantle it.
This book made me think about all the blue-haired retards who are still pursuing communist systems like socialism. It’s amazing how they can ignore all the famine and death and destruction that communism has wrought. Marx at least has the excuse of naivete. He didn’t live to see the bloodbath communism would bring to the world.
Then there’s all the people that say “well that wasn’t really communism.” I agree fascistic authoritarianism is not communism on paper. But true communism always leads to authoritarianism. As long as people are people and have eyes and can see that some are working harder than others, then communism will never work. To be putting in more effort and getting the same outcome as those who don’t, that pisses people off and rightly so.
We need to be way more hostile to communism than we are right now. The political Left in our country has done a great job of normalizing communism. It might be because of how both Nazism and Communism have been documented in our education system and in Hollywood. That might be the reason why we have a physical revulsion towards Nazism and not towards Communism. We’ve been culturally conditioned. When we think of Nazism we think of movies like Schindler’s List and all the WWII footage of the concentration camps that we see on the History channel.
There’s no big Hollywood blockbuster movie illustrating the horrors of communism. When people learn that Hitler and the Nazis hated the communists in Germany, and that Communist Russia destroyed the Nazis on the Eastern front, it makes them think, “oh I want to be on the side that smashed the Nazis.” On paper, communism is the far opposite side of fascist Nazism so people think that’s the side to be on. But in reality in history, communism has always become just as fascist and bloodthirsty as Nazism. There’s just no popular movies showing that. Most people are just ignorant of Mao’s cultural revolution and the fact that it had a much higher body count than Hitler’s Nazism.
All this cultural and educational indoctrination has rightly made us repulsive of the evils of Nazism but it ignored the evil of Communism.
We all know it’s socially acceptable to punch a Nazi. It needs to become just as socially acceptable to punch a communist. We should have disdain and hatred towards it. People should be afraid to be called a communist. It should be taboo and anathema in our culture.
It could come through entertainment. There should be movies made about Mao’s cultural revolution. Hollywood never makes a movie like that because their biggest market is China. There’s a billion pairs of eyeballs to sell to and they’re not allowed to see that story.
In the Netflix series The Three Body Problem the opening seen is a flashback to the cultural revolution in China. A Red Guard thug executes a professor in front of a large crowd because he wouldn’t confirm that atheism is true. That’s incredible. That scene obviously didn’t air in the Chinese version of the show. But the fact that they’d show a scene like that at all is amazing. I bet most people watching that had no idea what it was. We have no historical framework for the atrocities of communism. I pray we can course correct in time for our kids to understand the evils of communism.
Without having read a lot of the material presented in the introduction, it was a little difficult to keep up with some of the philosophies and ideas surrounding and leading up to communism. Hegel sounds dense.
I learned a lot from this book. It made me hate communism more, but I also understand that negative aspects of capitalism and the industrial revolution that led Marx to his ideas. They’re just terribly bad ideas. The remedy shouldn’t be so horrifically worse than the disease.
I don’t know how I feel about recommending The Communist Manifesto. I’d only recommend it to people who are interested in going to war against communism. We have to fight it. All the woke critical race theory and queer theory, atheist humanism crap that’s getting pumped into our schools, it all starts with Marx. If you want to learn where this stuff is coming from in order to know how to attack it, then read the manifesto. It’s short, but the long introduction in this Penguin Classics edition was worth reading too.
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Notable Quotables
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In particular, such an account will show that what became Marxian socialism in Germany in the beginning had nothing to do with industrialization or the social and political aspirations of industrial workers. On the contrary, it emerged from debates among radical disciples of the German philosopher Hegel, about what should replace Christianity or Hegel’s rationalized variant of it, absolute spirit. Furthermore, when seen in a larger European perspective this emergence of German socialism out of a movement of religious reform was not particularly surprising. Socialism had also emerged out of post-Christian movements of religious reform in Britain and France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. ( p8)
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The speculative or quasi-religious origins and character of socialist creeds, including that built upon the pronouncements of the Manifesto itself, continued to shine through the laboriously elaborated socioeconomic façade.
historians have rightly likened the passions, intransigence and extremism of twentieth century revolutions to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (p9)
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The end of communism was not the end of history’, but the end of an epoch in which criticism of global capitalism overlapped with the rise and fall of a powerful and organized post-Christian religion that, in the name of science, addressed itself to the oppressed. (p10)
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Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature’ ‘, Engels proclaimed at Marx’s graveside in 1883, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’ (p21)
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conspirators who called themselves ‘the Equals’ had believed that popular sovereignty and a virtuous republic could never be secured while inequality remained. The corrupt government of Thermidor was therefore to be overthrown and replaced by an emergency ‘dictatorship’ of ‘wise men’ akin to the Committee for Public Safety that had presided over the Terror two years before. This body would expropriate the rich, take over the land and establish a community of goods before handing power back to the people as constituted within an egalitarian and democratic republic. (p28)
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Etienne Cabet emphasized the environmental determination of character, peaceful change through the establishment of experimental communities and an alliance with an enlightened middle class. When he returned to France in 1839, he vainly pressed for a broad campaign for universal suffrage. This, he imagined, would be followed by the election of a dictator who would inaugurate a fifty-year transition to communism. (p29)
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Thereafter, although participatory Icarian democracy would replace the ‘government of men’ by the ‘administration of things’, continuing care would be taken to protect Icarians from the wrong ideas. Just as speaking out against equality would be a punishable offence in the republic of the ‘Equals’, so in Icaria all art and literature would be subject to communal approval. Education in Icarian schools would be supplemented by collective recitation and large gymnastic displays, while the morale of factory workers would be sustained by mass singing. (p30)
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communist ‘humanism’ of Moses Hess. According to the section on religion in Hess’s ‘Communist Confession’, God was the human species or mankind united in love’. God had seemed outside humanity, because humanity had itself lived in a state of separation and antagonism. But with the coming of communism, hell would no longer exist on earth, nor heaven beyond it; rather, everything that in Christianity had been represented prophetically and fantastically would come to pass in a truly human society founded upon the eternal laws of love and reason. (p46)
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As eldest son and presumptive heir to his father’s textile firm, Ermen and Engels, Engels had begun his lifelong collaboration with Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844. Both had been active among the Young Hegelians, the radical philosophical grouping that had grown up in Prussia during the preceding eight years. But during the preceding two years any semblance of unity within this movement had disappeared. At their meeting in Paris, Engels and Marx had agreed to write a joint work, The Holy Family, setting out their disagreement with other Young Hegelians. (p50)
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The Sacred History of Mankind by a disciple of Spinoza, effectively the first philosophical espousal of communism in Germany. According to The Sacred History, during the childhood of mankind there had been community of goods and an unconscious harmony between God and Man; in the second period, inaugurated by Christ, this harmony had gradually broken down with the coming of private property and the hereditary principle. The third epoch would witness the restoration of harmony both between God and Man and between man and man. The first restoration was heralded by Spinoza’s declaration of the unity of nature and spirit, the second by the principle of social equality championed by Rousseau and extended by the French Revolution and the communism of Babeuf. (p56)
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It was no longer a vision of the decline and fall of ‘the Christian world order’. It was now the analysis of an ostensibly secular socio-economic process. The notion of a final crisis had first emerged in Berlin in Young Hegelian discussions about the end of the ‘Christian state’ (p65)
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It was true, Hegel believed, that no belief or institution would survive unless justified by reason. But he did not think that such an idea had been an invention of the French Revolution. Ever since Luther, this assumption had been implicit in Protestant Christianity, just as it now formed the foundation of the modern state. (p76)
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Reason could not be treated as if it existed beyond the constraints of time and space. Reason had a history. It was embodied in language and culture. Languages and cultures changed over time and differed across space. Thus reason should not be considered a formal criterion of judgement, a mere ‘ought’, but rather as something embodied in more or less developed form in the spirit of a particular people.
Hegel had abandoned this ‘mechanical’ idea of nature and adopted a vitalistic conception drawing upon recent advances in the life sciences. Both Man and the whole of existence now belonged to a single substance, an absolute’ whose form was organic. (p77)
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Conversely, Engels’ ‘Principles’ straightforwardly advocated communism on the grounds that it abolished private property and educated children communally. It thus destroyed the twin foundations of hitherto existing marriage the dependence through private property of the wife upon the husband and of the children upon the parents. (p67)
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The defect of this romantic conception of ‘absolute life’ was that it abstracted from all specific differences and could only be grasped through religious or artistic intuition. Hegel soon became dissatisfied with this ineffable construct and proposed instead a transparent and unmysterious idea of ‘the absolute’, which could be grasped by philosophy as the self-moving embodiment of reason. To grasp this process was to gain access to ‘absolute knowledge’, in which ultimate reality could be seen as the activity of an infinite rational subject that exteriorized itself through its embodiment in nature, and then came to know itself through human history as absolute self-consciousness or absolute spirit. Hegel claimed that this process captured the basic Christian truth of the incarnation and was the speculative translation of the doctrine of the Trinity. (p78)
His early followers recorded their euphoria at learning that Man’s spirit was no different from God’s spirit or that Man carried the consciousness of God within himself, and they often interpreted this blissful sense as the fulfilment of the redemptive promise of the Christian faith.
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Religion rather than politics was the arena in which Hegel looked most vulnerable. In the 1820s, his idea that ‘absolute spirit’ was the rational kernel of Christian belief was anathema to fundamentalists; his claim that religion and philosophy differed only in ‘form’ was also regarded with deep suspicion. (p81)
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Nevertheless [David Friedrich] Strauss set his conclusions firmly within a Hegelian framework. If religious representation were to accord with philosophical truth, he argued, the Gospels must first be freed from the superstitious and supernatural setting in which they had originally been placed. The rational truth contained in Christianity was that of the incarnation, the union of human and divine. But the Gospels had concealed this truth behind an archaic form of representation, in which the ‘idea’ was embodied in a narrative about the life and activity of a single individual. If modern ‘critical scientific consciousness’ were to restore Christian truth it would have to replace the Jesus of the Gospels by the idea of humanity in the whole course of its development. For only the infinite spirit of the human race could bring about the union of finite and infinite implied in the Christian story of incarnation and translated into conceptual form in Hegel’s notion of ‘absolute spirit’ (p83)
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Bauer’s starting point was the match between the Bible and the Hegelian idea. In his original answer to Strauss, he had attempted to establish a concordance between reason and the Biblical narrative,
What this study showed was that the distinction between John and the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) was not one of kind, but only of degree. Bauer’s approach built upon a discovery established in orthodox Biblical commentary during the 1830s: that the original evangelist had been Mark. Mark had set down the original connection between events; the other Gospel writers had supposedly elaborated and supplemented Mark’s account by recourse to sayings and anecdotes taken from a broader tradition. (p86)
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Between 1840 and 1842, in response to government hostility, the Young Hegelians elaborated a wholesale attack on Christianity and conjoined it with a republican critique of the Prussian state. The attack on Christianity was led by Bauer. Christianity was not, as Strauss thought, grounded in the substance of tradition, of Jewish apocalyptic expectation or of the Old Testament God of Spinoza. It was a response to the new universal conditions of the Roman Empire. It marked the ‘death of nature’ and the beginning of self-consciousness, but unfortunately only a false beginning. For Christianity did not represent a true victory over nature achieved through knowledge of nature’s laws. It was rather the projection of an individual self-consciousness that withdraws from the world, of a personality that grasps itself in antithesis to the world, but feels helpless to overcome it except through the false medium of miracles. Similarly, in its portrayal of the Christ of the Gospels, Christianity had created not a true man but an ego alien to actual humanity. The historical Jesus had overcome the separation between human and divine only at the cost of creating a new form of religious division and alienation. Christianity therefore did not provide Man with knowledge of himself, but only of a parody of himself. Reform, as Bauer went on to insist in 1843, would require not merely the elimination of God, but an end to Christian culture with all its age-old assumptions about human incapacity. (p88-89)
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Hegel had started from logic, but logic did not confront the problem of existence. It was impossible to grasp the state absolutely’ by detaching it from history. “Only with the entry of history into the realm of science does existence assume relevance.’ (p93)
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Schelling claimed that Hegel’s philosophy and the ‘absolute idealism’, which he himself had also once espoused, were only negative It could only explain what happened once there was a world, but had nothing to say about the fact that there was a world.
But if reason could not account for the fact of its own existence, it would therefore be necessary to begin, not with reason, but with the contingency of being. Hegel’s dialectic could say nothing about existence, nor could existence be absorbed into Hegel’s system.
According to Schelling, existence and idea, the world and God, could not be synthesized in thought, but they could be conjoined through will. Free will and existence conjoined in a theistic metaphysics would then form the basis of Schelling’s ‘positive philosophy’. (p93-94)
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Philosophy, Marx declared, took its stand against ‘all heavenly and earthly Gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. (p94)
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Marx still remained optimistic. He continued to expect the imminent return of ‘the self-confidence of the human being, freedom’, which had ‘vanished from the world with the Greeks and under Christianity disappeared into the blue mists of the heavens’ (p99)
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In this way, Man’s access to the universal and the infinite remained unaffected by the replacement of God or ‘absolute spirit’ by ‘Man’.
Since the universal and the infinite were objects of Man’s thought (in religion, for example), the being of Man as a species was likewise universal and infinite. Religion was, therefore, not false, but misdirected. The true infinite was not an external God, but ‘Man’ as ‘species being’. (p107)
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Bifurcation between state and civil society took the same form as that found in Feuerbach’s depiction of Christianity. If religion registered ‘the theoretical struggles of mankind’, the ‘political state’ registered its ‘practical struggles’. Just as Christ was ‘the intermediary to whom Man transfers the burdens of all his divinity’, so the state was ‘the intermediary between Man and Man’s freedom’. (p110)
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Man’s access to the absolute was through knowledge, and it was only insofar as he had access to absolute knowledge that he could participate in the infinite.
Marx’s alternative was an attempt to validate Feuerbach’s more unlikely claim that the infinite could be derived from the finite in the form of a historical transtormation from Man as natural being to Man as natural human being. (p137)
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Stirner wrote,
the human religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion it separates my essence from me and sets it above me … it exalts ‘Man’ to the same extent as any other religion does its God or idol… it makes what is mine into something other worldly… in short… it sets me beneath Man, and thereby creates for me a vocation.
Feuerbach’s own admission that he had derived his notion of ‘species’ from Strauss, who had introduced the term as a dynamic substitute for the place of Christ in traditional Christianity. (p141)
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This proposition which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. (p203)
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“””””””””””””Quotes from The Communist Manifesto”””””””””””””””””””””””
It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. (p222) (First Manifesto quote)
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The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces ‘the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. (p224)
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The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. (224)
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The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons the modern working class the proletarians. (p226)
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a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.
He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. (p227)
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The lower strata of the middle class the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. (p228)
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This organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. (p230)
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All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission Is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. (p232)
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The Communists,
they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. (p234)
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The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom, activity and independence. (p235)
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Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. (p239)
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But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.37
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. (p240)
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The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. (p241)
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We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, if of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. (p243)
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Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. (p244)
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Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat. (p247)
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The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. (p258)
Solomon White 
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