The Communist Manifesto By Karl Marx Analysis

In Karl Marx’s 1848 political work The Communist Manifesto, he outlines the problems he observes in existing economic, political, and social structures while also expressing a desire to destroy those structures. Marx’s writing places heavy emphasis on class barriers in particular, exploring the discrepancies and class antagonisms between the “proletariat” laborer class and the “bourgeoisie” ruling class. The manifesto proceeds to provide an alternative to these existing sociopolitical class structures: “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” (Marx 244) The problem with this proposed structural goal is not the fundamental idea of eliminating class antagonisms, but rather that

The faceless everyman Marx portrays is hopelessly stuck in the system - which helps Marx push his agenda - but real-life everymen do sometimes find their way to wealth or contentment. All Marx accomplishes by trying to funnel working class people into an umbrella term such as “proletariat” is the creation of a fictitious class that has no hope of a better life without violence; i.e., Marx pushes working class readers to believe their lives have no potential for change or deeper meaning without aggressive overhaul of everything they know.

In ‘Proletarians and Communists,’ the second part of the manifesto, Marx proposes the abolition of private property, of family, and of national identity. As rebuttal for an anticipated argument, he repeatedly insists that the property, familial structures, or identities being destroyed will be the bourgeois’ and not the proletariats’, but due to the broadness of both terms it is impossible for readers to tell exactly who would be affected by the implementation or even the attempted implementation of

Although Marx could not know how history would unfold, current readers of the manifesto cannot help but see the historical failures of Communism. There have been many governments that attempted to utilize Communism as a foundation for policy, but currently there is only one nation built on Communist ideals that found economic success: China. Furthermore, China turned to capitalism in 1978 before it actually succeeded as an economic superpower, so its Communist ideological roots cannot be credited with its modern-day success. There is no instance where Communism succeeded for a prolonged period of time; this should not be ignored while analyzing the manifesto as a modern reader. The historical failure of Communism is largely due to the manifesto’s vagueness. The movements that led to the rise of Communism all over the world were based heavily on Marx’s writing, but due to the aforementioned weaknesses in Marx’s style, it is impossible that these movements were true reflections of The Communist Manifesto’s intended message; instead, they were nothing more than varying interpretations of a particularly uninterpretable