The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels

Preconceptions: I'm guessing this is just some good old 19th century rabble-rousing: Hooray for unions! Rah! Rah!

Reaction: You'd think a pamphlet designed to foment world revolution would be less...boring.

There's nothing in this little book that isn't more inspirationally expressed in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine or John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and both of those authors understood a fundamental truth: you get more flies with honey than with rancid vinegar.

Now, I'm under no illusion that the books on this list are thrilling adventure stories. I'm sure those conservative academics chose them for their influence on the elite instead of the masses. Yet a crackpot idea like Communism could certainly use a more polished and interesting treatise. If you're going to sell me your utopian society, your writing had better include some breathless enthusiasm and "gee whiz" rhetoric.

Marx and Engels, alas, took the bitching and moaning approach.

The book describes the class struggle that defines all human endeavor and gloats about the inevitable rise to power of the proletariat...who, by the logic of the book, will then become the new bourgeoisie.

Perhaps the most intriguing characteristic of the Manifesto is its peculiar tone-deafness to irony.

• The book explains that all of history is a struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed, between the people who have stuff and the people who actually work to make the stuff. Yet the Communist goal is "not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property." But wait: isn't anyone who has property automatically bourgeois, defending an oppressive status quo?
• Elsewhere, Marx and Engels write, "Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property." You mean...like the idea of Communism?
• They go on to say, "The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class," which was certainly true of the ruling Communists in Soviet Russia, not to mention those currently ruling in China.
• "Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things," they write, though presumably Communism itself is exempted whenever it becomes the political order of things.

As manifestoes (manifesti? manifesten?) go, this one isn't very inspiring. There's no plan for action: the destruction of the bourgeois status quo by the triumphant proletariat is the inevitable consequence of all human history, the climax of our social evolution.

If that's the case, why write a manifesto? Why not just sit back and wait for the forces of history to do their work? Why should all the workers of the world unite when destiny has already united them?

I'd probably be sent to a gulag for that.

My final observation is one I've made before about other books. The main flaw of the manifesto is that it relies so heavily upon absolutes: the words "every," "each," "all," and "always" appear too frequently in this book. It's hard to take anything seriously that does not account for the possibility of its own fallibility.

The manifesto--and the Communism it encourages--are supposedly inevitable. The book proclaims we will one day rise above these class struggles with a new system...which, alas, will itself just be another class system created by criticizing the last one.

Try as it might, Communism can never rise above the system it tries to criticize.

Extra Irony Points: You could probably make an Ayn Rand fan's head explode by pointing out that her conflict between producers and second-handers is not much different than Marx's between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Verdict: This book won't make anyone evil who isn't already pissed off, broke, and itching for fate to change their lot. Maybe that explains its popularity in the counter-culture movement of the Sixties.

I just don't believe there was ever a time when quoting from this dry tome could get you laid at Berkeley.

Simpler time, I guess.

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