The Communist Manifesto

Bard Sequence professors Rosie Jayde Uyola (BHSEC Bronx), Paul Gilmore (Plainfield High School, NJ), and Andrew Worthington (Orange High School, NJ) discuss Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. 

Transcript

Matt Park
It is high time that the communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter of communism with a manifesto of the party itself. To this end, communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish, and Danish languages. Welcome to the Bard Sequence Seminar Podcast. Today, it's the Communist Manifesto. 

I'm Matt Park, Director of the Bard Sequence, and today I will be your friendly moderator. I'm joined by Rosie Jade Uyola, Paul Gilmore, and Andrew Worthington. Andrew, would you mind starting by introducing yourself briefly?

Andrew Worthington 
My name is Andrew Worthington. I'm the professor for the Bard Sequence at Orange High School in New Jersey. And I live with my wife and my son in Newark, New Jersey. And summer break just started and I'm looking forward to being able to do a lot of fiction writing and reading.

Matt 
Thank you, Andrew, and happy summer to you and to all. Paul, would you mind introducing yourself?

Paul Gilmore 
Hi everyone, my name is Paul Gilmore and I served as the Bard seminar instructor at Plainfield High School in New Jersey. My background, my PhD is in American literature of the 19th century and that's primarily what I've taught over my career.

Matt 
Thank you, Paul. And Rosie.

Rosie Jayde Uyola
Hey, all. I'm Rosie Jayde Uyola, and I am honored to be here today. I currently teach for Bard College Bronx, and I previously taught at Bard Newark. My kids and I are really looking forward to summer. Today is the very first day of summer vacation. And yeah, just really delighted to be here with all of you. My background is in American studies and history. And so I'm really excited to dive into the Communist Manifesto today.

Matt 
Great, thank you everyone. Communist Manifesto Summer Edition. Socialism in the sun, I guess. All right, so before we begin, full disclaimer, we are not here as experts who are here to have the final say on what the Communist Manifesto is really about. Instead, we are going to talk about what the Manifesto is to us and why we value the text. 

We are going to ground our readings and evidence from the text, but if we do a decent job, you should be walking away from this with as many questions as answers. We are also not here to summarize the text for you because whether it's a podcast or an essay, you should not spend your precious time giving your audience a literal summary of something that they need to read themselves. If you're listening to this, go read the thing. 

To start us off, Rosie is going to give us a bit of context on the manifesto. So we're going to dive into some of the background information on this text, where it comes from, and why it's important. Rosie, would you mind starting us off?

Rosie
Delighted, delighted. So welcome everybody. As Matt shared, it won't be a summary, but just to give us a little background of what was going on when the Communist Manifesto was published, created, and then also a little bit about the initial reception. So the Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in late 1847, published in February, 1848 at the request of the Communist League, which is a small revolutionary organization advocating for the working class. It was intended as a manifesto, or we could think of it as a political program and a call to arms for the proletariat. 

So a little bit of historical context, key moments that influenced the text. We have the industrial revolution and capitalist expansion. So by the mid 19th century, capitalism had become the dominant economic system fueled by industrialization, urbanization, and wage labor. Marx and Engels analyzed the effects of industrialization, writing, quote, "The bourgeoisie has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceded generations together." However, this expansion came at the cost of proletariat exploitation as workers face long hours, low wages, and inhumane working conditions. Here I encourage students to think about what factory work looked like.

Political turmoil and revolutions: So it might be helpful to recall that in the decades before 1848, bourgeoisie revolutions, so the French Revolution, for example, had overthrown feudal rulers, but established capital rule instead. Marx and Engel critique this pattern, quote, "The modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." And the Manifesto was published on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, which erupted across Europe, specifically in France, Germany, Italy, and Austria. 

A few things to consider as well in terms of socialist and communist thought. Various socialist ideas circulated long before Marxism. And here we have utopian socialism and reformist socialism. Those are a little bit beyond the scope of today's podcast, but the Manifesto distinguished communism from these approaches, rejecting just utopia in favor of historical materialism. So thinking about the actual life of real people, actual workers. It explicitly critiques utopian socialism by stating, quote, "They wished for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat," end quote. In the initial reception, so we're thinking 1848, 1870s, the Manifesto had limited initial impact due to the failure of these 1848 revolutions to produce change. Marx actually said the manifesto had become a historical document.

 However, its ideas gained traction among radical intellectuals as well as labor organizers. In terms of expansion and influence, we know that it becomes or resurfaces as a key revolutionary text during the late 19th century. And here we can think about the Paris Commune of 1871, and then 20th century and beyond. I think we could see a lot of the key ideas to present day. So from 1917, the Russian Revolution, bringing about the manifesto to its prominence. And then we could think about anti-colonial movements, a lot of the labor movements in both the West and around the world.

Matt 
Great, thank you Rosie, that was wonderful. And definitely under the five minute mark, which is always impressive. Andrew, Paul, is there anything that you'd like to add in terms of context that you are aware of or you consider to be especially important surrounding the manifesto?

Paul 
I think one of the interesting things that Rosie kind of alluded to is the final section where they spend a lot of time really trying to differentiate themselves from all the other kinds of competing socialism. So there's a piece by Louis Menon that I read with my class from the New Yorker. It kind of talks about how Marx is just kind of picking fights within this pretty small group of radicals in Europe during this time. And so that's the part that you seem to be able to forget that doesn't seem to have the historical momentum and impact that the rest does because most of those people have been forgotten where we now know of Marx because of Marxism, but we don't really talk about Fouriests any longer.

Matt 
Thank you, Paul. Andrew, anything on your end?

Andrew 
I think they covered a lot of the key points. mean, one of the things I emphasize with my class about the context is just that, it was basically this obscure text for like 20 years after it was written until the Paris Commune happened. And it's kind of this text that's revived over time. Every time there's class war or revolutions, especially after 1917, then with the spread of the international revolution. And also that it was supposed to be like a really easy text for workers to read, which when I tell my students that, they usually find that amusing that it's supposed to be an easy text for workers to read.

Rosie
I love that last bit because it was meant to be a small booklet that you could carry in your back pocket. And so I agree, my students have a similar experience. But it's one of the reasons why I really love starting our course with this text. Should we jump into our personal connections by chance?

Matt 
Definitely, and anytime that you all want to bring up your students experiences with the text, that is always, of course, welcome within these discussions. This is a podcast which does keep in mind that we hope many of our listeners will be students and their experience reading the text in the classroom should definitely, if possible, be brought into the discussion, so absolutely. We are now going to move on to our personal introductions with the text. 

When did you all meet the manifesto for the first time if you even remember that? I imagine for some of us it's been quite a long time since we were introduced to the manifesto. So do you remember that meeting? If so, what was it like? And how did you view it originally when you first read the text?

Paul Gilmore 
So I'll start. My oldest copy of the Communist Manifesto is from like 1981 or 1982. So I got it when I was maybe 11 or 12. Ronald Reagan had recently become president and was talking about Russia as the evil empire. This was before Gorbachev and Perestroika and glasnost and all that. And so there was a lot of anti-communist rhetoric in the air. 

I was not a fan of Reagan. I don't know how much of that was because of my parents, but you know, that seemed overblown and to me as a young budding intellectual, I wanted to know what they actually said, you know, and so I still have, I think actually one of my daughters has that copy, this little paperback copy from 40 years ago, but that's when I first came across it was reading it kind of on my own because of the political situation of the time and I then probably re-encountered it in a political philosophy class in college and then once I got to graduate school there was quite a bit of Marx and really that's where I got more into Marx more broadly, undergraduate and graduate. Some of his earlier writings before Communist Manifesto, what some people consider the more humanist Marx that I found most interesting and kind of productive for thinking about the ways that capitalism has structured our world and our society and culture.

Rosie
Happy to jump in next. So my experience is a bit younger, dare I say. I am a biracial, Haitian, Ukrainian person, and so I grew up in communism, in Moscow specifically. 

And so I'm gonna help set the stage a little bit. imagine, I'm gonna set the scene. Imagine you're growing up in the Soviet Union. And it's not just any old childhood, but specifically you're biracial and you're half Black, which means you're already living life like an ideological paradox. I really connect to Trevor Noah on this, the whole idea of quote unquote being born a crime, but not a crime under communism because racism was against the constitution.

So one part of my identity was connected to the Caribbean island that overthrew enslavement through revolution. And then on my Ukrainian side, we're Eastern European Jews. And so I was born into a country that was inside of the world's or one of the world's larger communist experiments. And what was a little bit tricky is that when you're a kid in school, or at least in my experience as a kid in school in Moscow, I got the more PG rated version of "Marx is Santa Claus." So essentially, you know, Marx and Engels are thought of as brilliant men who liberated workers and the USSR was proof that their vision came true. 

And I don't want anybody to come for me, right? I am not into Putin in any way. Obviously the current war is terribly immoral and wrong, but I have to say that my childhood had a lot of beauty to it. Education was completely free. Health care was completely free. And there were a lot of opportunities, even though they were state sponsored. As I became older, I also reread the Communist Manifesto as a teenager when I moved to the States. My dad for my 13th birthday gave me the Communist Manifesto as a little pocketbook, and also gave me Asada Shakur's autobiography.

And so then the whole idea of workers of the world unite and you have nothing to lose but your chains took on a civil rights, civil black power liberation kind of angle. So when I got to teach it at Bard, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe my lucky stars.

Andrew
My first encounter with the Communist Manifesto was in my high school's library. I checked it out. I think I'd heard of it from, I don't know, I grew up in a conservative background, but I think I heard about it from like punk music or something else in like adolescent rebellion. This was around like 2002 or so. So in the build up to the Iraq war and during the early so-called war on terror, where communism just kind of seemed like a historical curiosity for a little bit at that point, at least to me. 

And I remember I annotated the copy, which I guess I wasn't supposed to because it was a high school library book, but it seemed unopened and unread. It seemed like totally fresh, like it had just been sitting there for a while, which I wasn't really sure. Maybe it was because communism was just so obscure to people where I was from at that point. We also had a, the librarian was known as the Book Nazi, so she made the library kind of unpopular. So maybe that was why people hadn't read it. But yeah, when I read it, it kind of formed this constellation of new people that I was reading, like Noam Chomsky and Henry David Thoreau, new authors and ideas I was discovering. And then I read it again a few years later when I was actually a student at Bard, and it was part of Seminar which is what I now teach. And it was part of this constellation of enlightenment thinkers that I was reading. So Marx and Engels were definitely part of that. 

And I think the first few times I read it, part one definitely resonated with me a lot where they're talking about the historical class struggle. Part two, definitely lots of questions there as they start describing the proletariat and what a dictatorship of the proletariat could look like. And then part three, where they're talking about the different tendencies of socialism in 1848 or 1847, definitely seemed more dense and obscure to me. But overall, I found it as an intriguing text, which is why I've read it many times.

Matt 
Thank you all. I will ask one follow-up here, which is just how has the text changed over time for you? So you all spoke very eloquently about some of your first meetings with the text. In the intervening years, has the text dramatically changed for you as you've read it across different years, different decades, as your own life has changed? I'm curious to know if you feel like it's changed dramatically since when you first read it, or or if it has kind of retained its original meanings and associations for you.

Andrew 
I think when I first read the text, I went into it with a lot of people reading it in America do with just like different context and almost like propaganda about like what certain terms mean. I remember one thing was from like history class. I had been told like the proletariat very specifically only refers to industrial working class. So you had to be like working in a factory basically, if you were going to be considered proletariat, which then at that point made it seem like, well, this is an outdated text to a certain extent. so I think it was as I started, as I like started reading the text on my own without like accepting other people's definitions for what stuff was in the text. That's when I was able to actually maybe, find more ownership over the text in terms of what it had to say for me living right here right now.

Rosie
Awesome. I totally agree with Andrew. I think what surprised me the most and maybe my relationship with the text changed significantly once I became an adult and noticed how misunderstood the text is. It's really mischaracterized by a lot of folks and I don't know if this is a challenge of different interpretations or if it's a challenge of people speaking about it but maybe not having read it.

So a lot of the mischaracterizations that I often experience, understandably, right, coming from students and adults as well, but this idea that communists are often accused of wanting to abolish all property, including personal belongings, homes, and individually earned goods. And that's simply not true. The text actually says, quote, the distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeoisie property.

And they also say, "we by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of products of labor. All that we want to do away is the miserable character of this appropriation." So the idea is that you're supposed to have your own home. I think students were surprised that I didn't grow up, you know, like living in a giant Costco or Walmart warehouse where we all wore gray and nobody could smile. And it was just doomsday.

Manifesto clearly distinguishes between bourgeoisie private property, meaning capital used to exploit labor, as well as personal property. So goods that you consume as individuals, things you need to live, your personal home. My grandmother owned her apartment. It was lovely. It's similar to having the Mitchell-Lama program in New York City where you're allowed to buy an apartment, but you can't speculate on it and you can't sell it for 10 times what you bought it for, you know, a few years later.

And I think another big misunderstanding is that communists wanted to abolish the family entirely. A lot of that portion of the text talks about a critique of the bourgeoisie family formation, especially the misuse and the abuse of women as, you know, reproductive labor. So it's funny to me because there are moments where the manifesto is actually funny and satirical and makes fun of the bourgeoisie. But I think those are the snippets that get pulled out and then misconstrued as though communists didn't want you to have a home and didn't want you to have a family and just wanted you to be in a factory all day. 

To Andrew's point too, I think something that I grew up with is this idea of class consciousness that anyone who sells their labor, regardless of their level of education or what they do, is the proletariat. So you could be a surgeon, but if you're selling your labor to do surgery, you're also part of the proletariat.
And I love that Andrew pulled up the idea that, you know, in the States, it's very much thought of as a blue collar labor situation. It's really who owns the production of labor and who doesn't.

Paul 
So in my class, I'll loop back to how my view of it's changed, but in my class most recently, we were kind of talking about that exact point in thinking about doctors, right, physicians who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars, but in some ways, given the kind of system we have in the United States, do fit their definition of the proletariat, right? They have little control over their capital. Some of them do, of course, they own their own practices, but those who are working for big medical corporations, even if they're making a lot of money, aren't necessarily have the kind of freedom that Marx and Engels are hoping for. 

I think, yeah, you my background is that I probably had a standard kind of liberal reaction of the period of like, this is all makes kind of sense, but it's too idealistic and it doesn't work in practice. And that's why the Soviet Union and China, you know, they're not really such great places after all. And I think that's changed over time, partially with the fall of communism, which is kind of ironic that, you know, I've come to more and more see kind of ask, well, why not? You know, why isn't it possible? And to try to ask my students to dig a little bit deeper into the kinds of assumptions, especially in America about like, well, I, communism will never work. And I think Marx and Engels do provide some guidance in trying to answer some of those questions, although sometimes it's dated. So it's kind of curious, but maybe the fall of communism actually pushed me towards embracing it more than I had when I was a little bit younger.

Matt
So now that we have met you and met the text, let's get into it. What is your reading of the text? What is your take on the Communist Manifesto? To you, what are the most important facets of it? Why does it matter? 

Rosie
I'm just delighted to be here overall. I have to say my energy for this is super high. So I thought you were asking us to think about a closer reading of a passage specifically, and there are so many great ones to zoom into. So for example, quote, "The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class." As a historian and a history teacher, and a literature teacher, I think it's super useful to dig through this quote with students because the passage exposes how capitalist ideology dominates education, media, and culture, and also how the ruling class presents its own interests as universal truths, often obscuring class struggle. 

For example,  in the wording, the phrase "have ever been" reinforces that this is a historical pattern and not just a capitalist phenomenon in the moment. And ideas suggest that political control is not just economic, but ideological, an insight later developed in Gramsci's theory of hegemony. So I think one key part of this that really captures my imagination is having students not think of the manifesto as a guide or something that's specifically attempting to lay out the future, but just a different way of thinking. 

So some questions that might come up are what happens when revolutions get stuck halfway? Because they do talk about lower communism and then perhaps higher communism. And I think we could see some of these ideals and thoughts in a lot of indigenous scholarship. Indigenous folks have been writing about racial and end-stage capitalism and its relationship with the environment, its relationship with people. So I think there's lots of opportunity there. 

Questions about what does freedom actually look like? And why do people in charge always seem to live a little bit better than the rest of us, the people that are actually creating the value in society through their labor, whether you're a teacher or a doctor or somebody pouring cement? And why is it that there's really not equality achieved no matter what system you're currently under?

Andrew 
I'm going to jump in, I guess, with my reading of the text. mean, the question you gave us was, what's the unique reading of the text? And I struggled because I don't really have a super unique reading of the text. I think the text was intended to be an organizing tool as Rosie laid out in the introduction. It was the manifesto for the Communist Party. So it was supposed to lay out the program or the analysis that they wanted people to know that they were organizing. And that's kind of the way that I've found it useful to read the text, is both in that historical context but also in our own society. I mean, I union organizing, labor organizing, so I've been able to find it useful that way. 

At the beginning of part one, Marx and Engels write, "Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie possesses, however, this distinct feature. It has simplified class antagonism. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other, bourgeoisie and proletariat." And I mean, if you look at really, a lot of the big social movements that have been happening in my lifetime and my students lifetime, this is kind of at the heart of it. I mean, the Occupy Wall Street stuff with the 1%, the 99%. If you're looking at the Bernie Sanders campaign, I mean, he was really talking about a lot of the wealth inequality that was happening.

And I think there's a lot that can be do be done just by looking at how there's the haves and the have knots. I liked how Rosie brought up property earlier because that's one of the things that kind of gets alarm bells going off in people's heads a lot of time is like, well, what about my personal property? And it's, not talking about personal property. They're talking about bourgeois property, property that can be used for exploitation and it's really only a very small percentage of people that are property owners that actually own their property. It's either people are either renting, people are paying debt to a bank. It's about, I think, 20 % of the actual population that really owns property outright. And I'm sure that's decreasing as we go through time because less and less people are able to actually own property outright. 

So I think there's a lot of organizing that can be done just emphasizing those class divisions in order to work for change, most people can agree like the world's not perfect and there's a lot of things that we can change. And I think just looking at those specific class divisions is helpful, even though it is reductive in a lot of ways, I think it's helpful in that way. 

And just one other thing on that point is a little later in part one, they say "the proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society cannot stir, cannot raise itself up without the whole super incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air." I think we see this every day really anytime there's anything, whether it is a few years ago, raising the minimum wage from whatever it is, like $7 to $15. There's suddenly all this controversy around it, like what's going to happen to small business owners in whatever rural state or something like that, right? Even though massive amounts of people would benefit from this. Same thing with free higher education, which actually did exist in a lot of places prior to America becoming integrated. But then once it was integrated, then it would cost too much money. People would have to pay more of their wealth to help fund free higher education for all. So that's why we end up not really having free higher education anymore, like we used to have in New York City or in California. So just as an organizing tool that kind of looks at the binary that is existing, I think that is why it's useful. And that's kind of how I read it a lot of times that I read it.

Paul
I kind of come at it from the more theoretical lens in some ways, because it is, as Rosie and Andrew have pointed out, it is meant to be a call to arms, right, the very concluding sentence of you have nothing to lose but your chains. It's meant to be pulling together the proletariat and bringing about the revolution, but it does have a lot of the fundamental elements of the deeper kind of theoretical thinking that Marx and Engels develop in lots of other places. And so I think it is that kind of dialectical materialism or historical materialism, the ways they're trying to set that up, but also make it accessible to a large readership. That kind of makes, I find most fascinating. 

And with that, I remember, maybe not the first time, but some of the times I've read it, what kind of is astonishing at times is how, what a positive view they sometimes seem to have of capitalism, its incredible power to change the world and its world-changing power. And that's always kind of stood with me in terms of trying to understand some of the weird political movements of the last 50 years, where you have people who kind of dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who don't want things to change and yet are completely pro-capitalist, where I think Marx and Engels really make a very strong case that capitalism is dependent upon destroying those structures, right? So you have people who want capitalism but don't want the effects of capitalism. And so it's, I find it a fascinating text for some of those reasons.

Rosie
I wanted to echo Paul's comment as well because I really love that part too. I think a lot of people assume that the Communist Manifesto, or at least in my experience, folks might have this sense that it's going to just speak negatively about capitalism, but it's so much more nuanced and I think that's what makes it such a cool text to teach.

But Marks and Engels acknowledged that the bourgeoisie has been historically revolutionary in its ability to mobilize resources and to innovate, reshape the world through industrialization. They compare these achievements to monumental past projects like the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman aqueducts, emphasizing the scale of capitalist transformation. However, this progress comes at a huge cost. While capitalism drives development, it also does so at the expense of social stability and equality, creating contradictions that will ultimately lead to its downfall. So I really love how they're thinking through capitalism as defined by this constant revolutionizing a product, but also disrupting old social and economic structures, creating a continuous instability. 

And I love how they argue that capitalism thrives on innovation, but also generates uncertainty. So in that way, I think they really predicted a lot of the challenges that we're seeing today, whether it's the gig economy or this idea of overproduction and really the environmental impacts that are connected to it.

Paul 
I'm gonna jump in there quickly and maybe leap ahead because one of the questions was about things they leave out. And I think the environment is one of the things they really leave out. They have a sense of the, this is where their more positive view of capitalism starts to worry me, is the kind of the power of capitalism to better exploit the world for human interest. There doesn't seem to be many guardrails in there in the Communist Manifesto. mean, and partially that's because it's still a fairly early stage of industrialization, but for somebody reading it now, the kind of lack of attention, and this does maybe speak to some of the exploitation of non-Western resources and peoples as well, that this sense that, the momentum of history is towards greater and greater exploitation and control of nature by humankind. And capitalism will reach a certain point where it can no longer control that or handle that in a productive way. And then the proletariat revolution will just kind of inevitably happen. But there's not a sense of what that's actually doing to the world. Is my sense of things.

Matt 
Thanks Paul. So is that a part of your add, delete, rewrite? Something that you would like to see added to the text?

Paul
Yeah, that would be part of it. mean, and one person I think about there is Amitav Ghosh, who's an Indian American novelist and writer. And he has this book on climate change where he basically he is a novelist, but he kind of theorizes the novel as being the genre of fossil fuel capitalism, right, and that fossil fuel capitalism is really kind of drives a kind of individualism. And that's at the core of the novel, which he's very indebted to, but he's also very critical of. And I think what Marx and Engels, I mean, this is another part that I think Rosie and Andrew have touched on is that Marx and Engels are, back to what Rosie was saying, they're not calling for everybody to be this uniform same person all wearing gray in gray buildings, et cetera. But they are critical of a kind of bourgeois individualism. And so how is that tied together with the kind of exploitation of nature that Marx and Engels don't seem to have as much of a critical lens on?

Matt 
Thanks, Paul. Andrew and Rosie, would you mind, let's follow Paul's lead here and we'll skip ahead to our add, delete, rewrite, and then maybe we can circle back on close reading and believing and doubting?

Rosie
Thanks, Matt. Super happy to jump in. So I love how Paul kind of took us a little bit further on the environmental discussion. I do think they do some of this. So they talk about how the bourgeoisie has unleashed productive forces greater than any previous society, transforming nature, industry, and global commerce at unprecedented scale. So while maybe not talking about the complete destruction as we're experiencing now, I think a lot of us thought that the environmental changes we were anticipating maybe 50, 60 years from now, I certainly didn't think that they would be coming as quickly in the next 10 to 15 years. But I do think they put in some of those hints. 

In terms of revising the text for what I would personally change, I would add a section, I would add a new section explicitly addressing gender, race, and colonialism as forms of oppression that intersect with class struggle. I think while Marx and Engels focus on economic exploitation, they do not systematically analyze gender oppression or racialized capitalism. Engels later explored gender dynamics on the origin of family, private property, and the state. So we see that in 1884. But including this in the Manifesto, I think would strengthen its critique of all forms of hierarchy. 

So more specifically, I'm thinking about women, labor, and capitalism. The Manifesto does mention women briefly, I wanna give credit where credit is due. For example, quote, "the bourgeoisie sees his wife as a mere instrument of production," end quote. Super romantic. But it does not fully explore how capitalism depends on unpaid domestic labor and gendered exploitation. We see this even in little moments that are subtle. So for example, let's say for your job, you go to conferences or you have work-based travel. Often if you travel for X number of days, you're able to send out dry cleaning for your clothing, but never ever can you be reimbursed for childcare expenses. The idea is that you have a wife at home taking care of your children. That's just one itty bitty example. 

In terms of slavery and colonial capitalism, I'd love to see a section that talks about how capitalism was built on the transatlantic enslavement trade more explicitly, as well as colonial conquests. It's not really as clear in Manifesto. The historical part mentions slavery, but not as explicitly as I would like. And also a passage could be added discussing how capitalism extracts wealth from colonized and enslaved people. So I think just generally including race, gender, and imperialism would make Manifesto that much more comprehensive and better suited to analyzing capitalism's full structure today.

Andrew
The part that I think, if I was gonna add, write, or delete part of the text it would probably be the ten points for the dictatorship of the proletariat that come near the end of part two Which I think are very useful because it's one of the most explicitly like prescriptive parts of the text, but it's also problematic in the same way, because it's only 10 points and they're very brief. If we're just looking through the points, it would be hard for some people understandably to embrace some of the 10 points because people don't have a good experience with government. So if we're looking at even like, for example, point 5 centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. It would be very problematic to organize around just because like for example, I'll just put that out to my students every once in a while. We do a close reading of the 10 points and students will often bring up the example of the DMV. Like you don't want to have to go to the DMV in order to work with whatever currency you need in order to go buy food or whatnot, right? So they don't want this, people wouldn't want this intractable bureaucracy that's controlling their money. 

The same could be said for six, centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. Again, if people don't have good experiences with government, which some people do, but a lot of people don't, then people wouldn't really trust the government owning the means of communication or the means of transport. So I think there needs to be something, I don't know exactly how they could rewrite it. I came up with the idea of maybe adding an 11th point, but I think some of it needs to be restructured. 

I also think that part, which is the 10 points that they lay out for the dictatorship of the proletariat, which they're saying is gonna be this transitional government between capitalism and communism. These 10 points all come at the end of part two, and then the prior parts of part two are kind of in somewhat linear fashion laying out what they mean by all those 10 points. I think if they maybe had the 10 points first, then it would make more sense. Because the way it's written is a little bit backwards there, I find. But they end those 10 points talking about at the very end of part two about how in the place of old bourgeois society with its class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. So there is an instinct there for freedom, which I think everyone can kind of latch onto. But again, if people don't have good experiences with the government, then some of this would be hard. So I think they need maybe more explicit prescriptions about how government will work to keep government from falling into corruption, to keep government accountable, to keep government efficient, these kinds of things.

Paul
I find that interesting because it is something you hear, right, is like the DMV example. But it always makes me then think about trying to work with an insurance company in the United States or trying to work, right now I'm trying to get my stuff, I've just moved and trying to work with a moving company. The bureaucracy of capitalism can be just as bad or worse than the bureaucracy of government is what I would try to point out to students. But it is an issue, right? I mean, that kind of problem. And the 10 points are an interesting segment because we get so little of what communism is actually going to be. And that's one of the places where you kind of can try to actually see what they're talking about.

Rosie
Paul, that's a really great point. And I love that you countered a little bit of the DMV example. I totally agree with you because what I see as somebody who lives in a capitalist country now, but grew up in a communist nation is yes, absolutely, we don't want corruption, right? Regardless of system. That said, I think there's a way where communism and corruption are seen as one in the same through a Western capitalist lens. And I think that's a little bit intellectually dishonest. And at the same time, wealthy folks in capitalist countries love communism for themselves. So I have friends who were born and raised in Norway, they're Norwegian citizens. They get a check from the socialization of oil. They receive a stipend every month that just becomes direct deposited and they can study throughout Europe indefinitely and really choose employment based on their passions, whether they want to, let's say, work for public radio or create documentary films, or if they want to become an engineer, it's because they really love engineering and not because it's the best way to pay for grandma's dialysis.

And so I think a big part of this is absolutely, to Andrew's point, we don't want a corrupt government who is deciding who does or does not get health care. But I have to say, I totally agree with Paul where right now, trying to buy back the village, if we say that it takes a village to raise a child, trying to buy back the village through private markets is, I would say, is as bad if not worse. And the idea that the state does not exist to serve quote unquote the people, that it exists to serve capitalist interests. I mean, we certainly see it in our quote unquote, right, "very free" society right now. If we look at some of the SCOTUS decisions, if we see what's going on in the federal level, I think the Communist Manifesto is so important to teach in this political moment. And it's asking us larger questions to think about what is freedom? 

Angela Davis famously said, What is freedom? Is it freedom to starve? So sure, maybe capitalist systems talk about individual freedom, but if, God forbid, something happened to me and I were hit by a truck and couldn't work, my children and I would be homeless within three months. My rent is $3,000 a month. I don't have more than $10,000 across all bank accounts. What would happen to us? And even just the idea that my access to health insurance is tied to my employer. So even if I were in a work environment that, let's say, didn't serve my needs, I would be too scared to go because how would I provide for healthcare? So I think even though the 10-point system is not comprehensive and doesn't think of everything, just like the Black Panthers had the 10 points and just like the Young Lords had the 10 points, it's more of a jumping off space rather than something that's supposed to be a comprehensive list.

Andrew
Yeah, I just want to jump in and mention that like some of the counter arguments you guys introduced, I do bring up when students bring up that stuff. But I do think there is something at the root there of how do we transition from these 10 points of the dictatorship of the proletariat to a free association of all workers, which hasn't been done successfully yet. And I think like as critical thinkers, we need to kind of try to flesh out some of that. But I mean, yeah, I agree with all those counter arguments you guys are presenting. mean, the Marx and Engels themselves say that society now is just the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Matt
So I'm going to steer us back to our close reading now. So pick a passage, word, or phrase that is worth reading closely. Which did you choose and why does it matter? If you chose a passage that is relatively short and you have it handy, please read the direct quotation. If not, if it's too long or if you don't have it, you can certainly summarize it. What did you all feel was worth close reading from the manifesto?

Andrew
I mean, I think the 10 point plan matters because it is, it's one of the, I said, it's one of the most prescriptive parts of the text. I think there's parts that people may be skeptical of because there's historical evidence that they can point to different events happening within socialist countries, they have their own experiences with government, and again, I think if people haven't had good experiences with government, it's hard for them to envision government working, not that corporate bureaucracies are working for people anyways, right? 

If we look at number one, abolition of property and land and application of all rents of land to public purposes, I want to echo a lot of what Rosie was saying earlier about the definition of property that they have here. This first one is one that usually comes up a lot in class and be like, "well, I don't want my property being taken." And then we'll point back to the beginning of part two, where they're discussing personal property versus bourgeois property and how abolishing all property is not part of their program. They're into abolishing bourgeois property, which they also call private property.

I think this is kind of what I have to do a lot of times when I'm reading the text personally, or when I'm teaching it is like, look at these different 10 points and then look back to where, where, where do they elaborate on it more? I also think it's important to note how some of these things already exist in society. noticed on the student podcast, one of the students brought that up also. I mean, we have number two, a heavy progressive or graduated income tax. We also have, if you look at number 10, free education for all children in public schools, abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. In the United States, these things exist in some form. And then that's also a talking point there. Well, why does that exist? Well, it's most likely a concession by the ruling classes in order to stop people from going for all the other 10 points that they could possibly go for. 

If we look at number five, which I already talked about, centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a national bank with state capital and exclusive monopoly. Again, can seem scary because of the inefficiency of different government bureaucracies, but also could maybe not seem scary when you think about the banks that you already have to work with, right? And the insurance companies that you already have to work with. So, these 10 points are really what I focus on the most when I'm teaching the text. Because I think especially for part two of the text, they're kind of this labyrinth that you can open up all sorts of other things to read about and actually what are we talking about when we're talking about the text itself rather than talking about maybe whatever definitions we've been told in school or other people or how communism has worked according to other people. Let's actually look at what the text says. So that's the one that I mainly go to for a lot of close reading.

Rosie
Awesome, Andrew, I love that you brought up the progressive tax because I think it's one of those wonderful examples for students where things aren't exactly what they seem. So for sure, we have a progressive tax system in the United States, but really when you dig further, the amount of subsidy that exists for wealthy people is one that I didn't fully wrap my mind around, I wanna say until the last few years. Right, so one example that I'll give is the difference between FSA and HSA. So FSA is somebody who is working class. I am part of the proletariat. But the idea that the government will allow me to put away $3,200 per year before taxes are taken out. And I'm supposed to use that as my little slush fund in case I have medical expenses above my AGI. Cool, great.

But if you don't use it or you don't estimate your expenses accurately, you can't add more to that slush pile. And you also lose that money in case your private provider decides, or the private FSA manager decides, oh well, this expense doesn't count and this expense doesn't count. The HSA, on the other hand, one that's used by a lot of people who are wealthier, is a triple tax advantage to count where the money is not taxed when it goes in. Receipts can be saved indefinitely. So people basically just don't actually use it to reimburse themselves for medical expenses. They use it as another way to invest in the market or the S &P 500 more specifically. And then they're able to at the end of life when their overall tax is much lower, often 12, 10%, that's when they're able to put up all of those medical expenses and essentially not pay tax on the growth of that money in the market.

And I think it's a little bit in that nitty gritty that we can show students where how something reads on paper isn't necessarily how it's operationalized in real life. Another example of this is the rule of 72. I show this to students while teaching the Communist Manifesto. It's this idea that capital invested in the S &P 500, which is a slice of the top 500 performing companies, allows you to double your wealth every 10 years. So if you have $600,000 in your retirement account, in 10 years, you will double that amount. And then in 10 more years, that amount will double as well. That's just not possible if you're actually paying income tax on all of your wages and not able to save for the future. So there's just a way where, sure, it sounds like we have progressive income tax, but really, wealthy people can shore up that money, not have it count in many ways, and then at the end of life, be able to draw down at 4 % in their retirement and yet qualify for Medicare or Medicaid and all of these government programs that are designed to help working class people. But wealthy people could just act like they only earn $12,000 a year because they have all of these assets and all of these other types of ways to support themselves. So I think that's a really great example. 

In terms of reading closely in the text, I love all the examples that Andrew brought up, so I'll shift a little bit, but I wonder if it might be helpful for us to think about the spicy one, the misunderstanding of communists promoting, quote unquote, "community of women" as a free for all for relationships. I do warn students that it feels a little bit spicy. Communists are often accused of wanting to nationalize women or abolish sexual boundaries, but what the text actually says is a little bit more revealing. So quote, "the bourgeoisie sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. Nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeoisie at the community of women, which they pretend is to be established by the communists.
Our bourgeoisie has not even a suspicion that the real community of women has existed almost from time immortal." And so here Marx and Engels are arguing that it's the bourgeoisie society that already commodifies women through prostitution, domestic labor, marriage as property relation, and they call out the hypocrisy of bourgeoisie men who then feign moral outrage while already engaging in exploitative practices.

I think another area that I like to zoom into is the idea that communism, and I think this is a big misunderstanding, but the idea that communism is unnatural or anti-human. So, the mischaracterization is that communism is sometimes portrayed in the West as a radical break from human nature or historical development, this idea of competition. But what the text actually says is quote, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." And what the bourgeoisie therefore produced above all is its own gravediggers. So the authors frame communism as this logical and historical outcome of capitalism's internal contradictions. Communism is a response to what capitalism is already doing. And it's not just a utopian fantasy or an unnatural system.

Paul
So I kind of alluded to my passage a little bit earlier, but I'll read it in a bit more length. So, Marx and Engels write in talking about older economic organization, "conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epic from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away. All new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind." 

And I think this is the passage where they most kind of call out the revolutionary nature of capitalism and how it really stands as a different way of organizing economic and social relations and how it is distinctly different from everything that's come before. And I think it is compelling in registering and describing a tendency within capitalism of constant, and Rosie alluded to this earlier, the kind of constant disruption and uncertainty. But what I think they may miss is the ways that capitalism as it's developed over the last few centuries has been able to then kind of latch onto things that seem like they're maintaining those older institutions and those more conservative values, even if the economic forces are pushing against them, right? And so that's kind of alluding to the balance that I was talking about, kind of weird, what seems weird to me that how you can be conservative and say, you you want things to be the way they've always been, but then be very pro-capitalist. But people figured out how to do that, this just seems like an interesting passage for thinking about that.

Matt 
Time to inject a little bit of doubt. So let's do some believing and doubting. What is a passage from the text that can be both believed and doubted? And take both sides.

Rosie
So I'll walk through believing first and then I'll jump into doubting. So I think one example that's really landed nicely with my students is right from the beginning of the Communist Manifesto. So the idea that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. And I think while it's a simple phrase, sometimes it's a little bit tricky for students to wrap their minds around it, just because it helps to have that historical context as well. So in terms of believing, if we're defending the statement, a few evidence and explanation. So they talk about ancient slave societies, master versus the enslaved, and Marx and Engel explicitly reference, quote, "freemen and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed." This supports their claim that in every era, one class has dominated while another has resisted. I don't think we see that as much in Western teachings because often the class consciousness isn't as present as one would think. 

For example, in the Luigi case, it was the McDonald's worker who ends up reporting him to the police. So to me, that gives me a sense of that worker not necessarily having class consciousness. It's often worth noting that that worker also didn't collect the reward for turning him in. They talk about feudalism, Lords versus serfs. Under feudalism, landlords controlled land, while serfs worked it. And Marx specifically notes, quote, the feudal system of industry was replaced by the manufacturing middle class. This transition led directly to capitalist class divisions. Then we have the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat under capitalism. The manifesto describes this modern struggle as quote, "our epoch has simplified class antagonisms, bourgeoisie and proletariat," which shows that history continues to unfold through class conflict. 

And then capitalist crisis and revolution, Marx and Engels predict capitalism's eventual downfall. Quote, "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, is its own gravediggers." And here we can see that class struggle, at least according to this logic, is not just historical, but inevitable in the future. 

In terms of doubting the exact same statement, I think there are a few counter arguments and alternative explanations. So the idea that history is shaped by factors beyond class struggle is useful. There have been many historical events when we're thinking about religious wars, nationalist movements, some technological revolutions. I don't know if they could be fully reduced to class conflict. For example, the Renaissance, scientific revolution, for sure had financial motivations, but they are other transformations of society without necessarily or primarily being about class struggle. We also have other forms of oppression exist alongside class struggle. So when we're thinking about gender, race, colonial domination have all played an equally crucial role in shaping society. I wish Marx and Engels focused a little bit more about gender and especially on race. They certainly talk about economic struggle, but oppression can also take cultural, racial, and political forms. 

We know that some societies have lacked class structures, often intentionally. For example, certain indigenous and pre-capitalist societies operated without rigid class hierarchies, relying instead on communal forms of organizing. And to me, this suggests that class struggle is not necessarily universal, although I think that one could be argued a little bit in either direction. 

And then lastly, capitalism has incorporated the working class rather than being overthrown by it. This one I feel the most. This kind of makes my heart hurt. But Marx predicted revolution, but in many capitalist nations, workers gained higher wages, voting rates, and social protections instead. So I think some could argue that capitalism has adapted rather than collapsed. And one example of this that I share with students is our retirement accounts. So, if I'm a member of the proletariat, but my pension is tied up with how the markets are performing, I'm just as invested as let's say somebody who's a financier because I also don't want the markets to fall. I also took a big gulp between January and March of this month as we saw the last 10 years' of profits get erased. So, in some ways, I think capitalism has embedded itself in such a way where the revolution isn't coming. Sorry, kids.

Paul 
I mean I think that's a great point in that probably one of the blind spots for Marx and Engels is capitalism's ability to adapt and kind of incorporate without really changing the overall system, but enough on the edges where people feel that they do, and they actually do materially have an investment, even if they're not getting the big payoff. And I guess I will point to another place where I think they kind of have a blind spot like that, and that's towards the end, maybe it's in the middle.

They say the working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. And I think their sense that the proletariat would erase national differences is really not seem to come to pass. And in fact, that's part of the payoff, right, is that we see is in kind of more reactionary populist movements are highly nationalist, but they're trying to encourage the working class, the proletariat to identify with the nation first and foremost in a way that from a Marxist point of view is just leading to their greater exploitation. 

But, when I was in grad school, one of the big books that was kind of talking about this was Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. If I remember correctly, he starts by talking about the wars in Southeast Asia between communist countries and that this shouldn't be happening, right? That communism is supposed to be an international movement, but it ended up being very much a nationalist movement. And the nation state's been pretty hard to get rid of in that way.

Andrew
My believing and doubting focuses on some parts from the end of part one. The core idea is, well, I'm gonna read some quotes and I'll walk through them.

Marx and Engels write, "the 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 is ever rising again stronger, firmer, and mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interest of the workers by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the 10 hours bill in England was carried," which the 10 hours bill said workers should only work a maximum of 10 hours. Again, a sort of concession from the bourgeoisie. They continue later on. Next paragraph. "The bourgeoisie itself therefore supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education. In other words, it furnishes the proletariat with the weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie." And the very end of part two says, "what the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

I think there's some sense of, I believe, that the fundamental idea of class division can create class consciousness and then class power as they lay out seems to be some truth to that. The ruling classes supplying the working class with concessions also seems to be true. But as for the weapons of the bourgeoisie being used against it, I think there is some truth in that that I believe. I mean, we could even see that now, certain corporations, I mean, they've moved all their factories to the south because they can pay the workers less there, then they move them overseas to different countries where they can pay them less and less. But then eventually, these corporations might start using AI, then AI might displace even the people that are in the ruling class managing or administering these companies. So in that sense, they're their own gravediggers. 

But I do doubt it in the sense of, I kind of mentioned this earlier, but reading the text dogmatically can be a little problematic. I mean, I think when Marx and Engels wrote it, was meant as what we now call a flex for like an upstart communist movement, right? More than a real proposition. So it's meant to kind of throw some fear into people. And, I think in a lot of ways, capital and Marx lays this out in the actual book Capital, capital is more dynamic and fluid. And I think with the way we interpret the text like this need to be kind of more dynamic and fluid. There's myriad ways we are meant to keep thinking the system is the way it has to be and then any radical change will bring pain, right, which comes with all these different things that we could talk about, not even communism, but just like small social democratic reforms, suddenly are seen as like, well, this is gonna create this problem or this problem, this problem, right? Which again, I don't believe, but I think that capital has been, as kind of Rosie was laying out and Paul too, it's been very flexible with kind of adapting to new situations so that people are kind of stuck in a system that maybe they don't believe in, but they don't think it's possible to change.

Rosie
Andrew, I love that you ended your mention with a future forward. I totally see that as well. And I think there's a way where we need to imagine that another world is possible. I think Communist Manifesto does a great job of this as well, where they talk about the proletariat must unite across national borders, recognizing that its struggle is global and that capitalism must be overthrown worldwide.

Here I think Marx and Engels emphasize internationalism, arguing that capitalism is a global system that requires a global response. For example, I love how Andrew pointed out that while capital is mobile, workers are rooted to place. As many multinational corporations, find that labor increases in cost, let's say in China, and they start to move to Bangladesh or Vietnam or other areas where they can negotiate more favorable wages, the workers don't necessarily have the ability to move across national borders with quite the same ease as capital investment. And I think that part of what the manifesto does well is that it rejects nationalism and calls for international solidarity that anticipates later socialist movements, including the First International, as well as remains a central tenet of the communist theory today. 

And I also think that there's an argument to be made. Communists openly declare that their goals can only be achieved through the forcible overthrow of the bourgeoisie, as history has shown that ruling classes never surrender power voluntarily. And this is the part that gets really a little tricky when we have these class discussions because power won't concede voluntarily. So the revolution is by default and necessarily something that would be challenging to live through. I think that's one of the utilities of this text is that it shows you that things would be messy and not easy. It's not like we're just gonna smoke cigarettes at the Gallatin and everything will just form into place.

Matt 
Okay, thank you all. We are almost there. Two more categories. So the next one I'm calling The Specter Haunting this podcast after Marx's famous turn of phrase about communism as a quote unquote "specter" haunting Europe. The Communist Manifesto is incredibly incredibly quotable. There are some really amazing turns of phrase throughout the manifesto and this is the one spot where I will allow myself to inject my own opinion and thoughts here, separate from a lot of the issues that you all have been talking about, is that I find the manifesto to be beautifully written in many, many, many places. I think there are wonderful, wonderful turns of phrase which capture the imagination and connect and then make kind of connections to all sorts of other kind of ways of thinking, different times in history that I find to be just aesthetically very interesting and worth thinking about. Again, separate from your evaluations of capitalism, communism, separate from the political content of the manifesto, I find it to be incredibly well written, which is why I included this as one of the categories. 

So I'm asking you to do something here, which I think is quite difficult, which is what are actually the best lines from the Manifesto? What are the most aesthetically kind of beautiful lines? What are parts of the manifesto that you read that you find to be especially moving separate from the political context of the statement?

Rosie
Ooh, I have one, I have one. I don't know if it's, well, it's beautiful to me. I'll say that. So I love the part of the Manifesto that affirms that communism is not about abolishing personal belongings, only the social system of property that enables class exploitation. And so here I'm thinking of the following quotes, "hard won, self-acquired, self-earned property. Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeoisie form? There is no need to abolish that. The development of industry has already abolished it and is abolishing it daily." 

I like the part where it argues with the perceived kind of or anticipated critiques. And I think it gets a little bit spicy in this way. I also love how in the graphic novel version of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx is quite literally a standup comedian. And so he's being heckled by the bourgeoisie who are in the crowd and are throwing out some of these critiques. So I love how it anticipates some of the critiques in order to bring students into the dialogue and conversation. And the manifesto acknowledges that artisans and peasants once held personal means of production, but argues that capitalism has already destroyed this class through competition and industrialization. Therefore, this type of property is not the target of the communist critique.

Andrew
I have two different quotes, but they're close to each other in the text. So hopefully I'll be permitted to share two different quotes that I think are peak Marx and Engels. The first one comes at probably around like the second page, depending on what version you're using, but says "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." I think this is something that stands out to me in terms of like their discussion of political economy because it's something that like, I think so many people would agree with no matter what their political ideology is. And they might not agree with like the terms bourgeoisie and stuff like that, but when you see like elections in America, for example, and only like everyone on the media is saying that it's like do or die election. It's the end of the world. Then like only 60 % of the people in the country who are adults even bother to go vote. 

I think it shows that there's just like a lack of trust and commitment in terms in our governmental system that it's just run by someone and some people say it's like the deep state or it's big pharma or it's big tech or it's the ruling class in general or the bourgeoisie, whoever it is. I think there's a large swaths of the population that would just agree,, like even if we are getting certain benefits that maybe people in a lot of countries are not getting, the retirement systems, things like that. In general, we're living in a system where we're living paycheck to paycheck. We're getting scraps of the overall wealth that exists. And in general, it's not working for everyone. 

A few paragraphs later, there's another quote, which both of these quotes have to do with what we were talking about earlier with how he kind of describes the bourgeoisie in this positive light throughout the first few pages, but I do find that he's throwing a lot of shade at them throughout, the first time I read this text, back when I was 16 or 15 or whatever, I did not catch a lot of that shade. But now I'm starting to catch a little more of it. Even the quote that I just read, that's definitely not positive about the bourgeoisie. It's saying the bourgeoisie is controlling a corrupt government, basically. The other quote that's a few paragraphs later says, "the bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country," which is, I think, one of the points where it's like that's spot on, like you see McDonald's, like, no matter where you go in the world, basically. There's certain things that everyone, more or less, except for like, very remote parts of the world, like needs to exist to live in this like global system that is capitalism. And yeah, I really just like those two quotes, because they kind of, I think, still resonate today deeply. And they also kind of show how he's pointing out positive, historical, productive aspects of the bourgeoisie, but also throwing shade at the same time.

Paul 
This may be cheating, I would go with what Matt pointed to, I mean, the opening with its kind gothic overtones of the specter. And as I understand it, they're kind of creating this ghost story that they say is already there, right? That communism really didn't have much of a foothold and that there were all these competing different varieties of socialism and they're kind of saying like, no, there's this really nightmare story about us out there. Which probably wasn't true, but it's a false tale and now we're going to give you the true tale. But rhetorically it's a really interesting piece, way of starting it, and really strong-wit per piece, right? And they these two points that I think Matt already read at the beginning, know, communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power. It's probably not true, but in saying that they're almost making it true. And so they're creating the myth of communism that they say is out there. so rhetorically, it's a really interesting, productive start.

Rosie
I love that start too, Paul. It makes me think of Hamlet, right? The whole idea of a specter or ghostly presence, right? At the beginning and then anchoring it into time and space. I think it's brilliant.

Matt 
So I have already kind of broken the fourth wall and introduced myself into the podcast a little bit too much here, but I'm gonna do one more thing, which is I'm currently reading The Vampire: A New History. And there is a whole chapter in there on how Marx uses the Gothic figure of the vampire in his critique of capitalism across a number of works, not only the Manifesto, but some of his other major works as well. And a little bit too about Engels. But anyone who's interested in following up on this idea of marks and the way in which he uses gothic imagery, whether it is specters or vampires, can check that out as well. And with that, let me pull myself back out of the podcast.

Paul 
Yeah, so I'll follow that up. mean, a lot of us read this alongside or soon before or after reading Frankenstein, and there's a lot of interesting connections there too, where there are a lot of analogies that can be drawn of the bourgeoisie creating this thing that is this mishmash of people brought together in a way that's far more powerful than the creator itself, but that they can't control, right? And that this is in some ways is the nightmare of the bourgeoisie that they're trying to tap into.

Matt 
And Paul, that is the perfect segue into our final prompt, which is the seminar sequence. What are some other texts that you would pair with the Communist Manifesto? So Bard Seminar has been conceived of as a sequence of texts that can guide students and take them on an intellectual journey. What other texts, Frankenstein or something else, would you pair with the Communist Manifesto? And what journey would you like to take the reader on?

Andrew
The times I've taught this, I like to start with the Black Panther Party's 10 point plan, which they put out in the mid 1960s as kind of their own manifesto for their organization. And I like it because it helps situate the communist manifesto kind of more variable. The students are able to see like how it matters more in an American context, in a modern American context. Also just the experience of like what it was like to be in a communist party in the United States because as we all know, but sometimes the students don't know then we do some reading and discussion about this like, many members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Power movement in general were marginalized, assassinated, etc. by the United States government. Well, why was that? Well, it's a threat to threat to the power of capital in the United States and other powers that be. So that's definitely one text I like to use. as Rosie already pointed out, they have their 10 points. So it connects to the 10 points that Marx and Engels use in the Communist Manifesto. So that's definitely a text I always like to use. 

I do like to give a short excerpt from The Wealth of Nations to them. Definitely not the whole text, which I haven't even read, but I've read sections of it. So I try to give them an excerpt from Wealth of Nations just so they can kind of know like, here's what Marx and Engels were kind of responding to in terms of like capitalist theories. And also just like to introduce us to a basic discussion of economics, which a lot of times the students don't really know that much about like some of the basic things that go into economics and like how our economy works. 

So you do that, and then I also like to look at Lenin and some of what happened at the Bolshevik revolution he specifically had document called Terms of Admission to the Communist International. Which, I like to point the students to a couple different parts in their where he lays out the different terms of admission if you were in a socialist party or communist party and you wanted to be part of the international these are what you have to do in one of them is that in words and in deeds if you want to be in a socialist party, you have to be opposed to the colonial practices of your own country, which obviously had been a huge issue during World War I, which pretty much started the whole thing. It was like, in a lot of ways, it was a colonial war. And a lot of the socialist parties were just kind of silent and like, behind the flag of their own country. And he's like, no, you have to, that is capitalist exploitation. It's the world market. It's the international market. You have to oppose that too, which is really how the whole Communist Manifesto ends up taking off, because the communist movement was standing behind all these national liberation movements, anti-colonial movements. So I like to point them just to like a couple of the different terms of admission that he has in that document. 

So yeah, those are the texts I use. And then I also do connect it back to Frankenstein. And the students usually do a lot of the legwork with that themselves in terms of oppressor and oppressed. One creates the other, the other comes back to be his grave digger, that kind of stuff. There's a lot of clear connections there.


Paul 

When I taught it this past semester, we read quite a bit of Adam Smith, both some selections from Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is his kind of book on ethics and Wealth of Nation. And we kind of used that as a way to see the complexities that that even Smith sees in capitalism and some of the ways that he's starting to question certain parts of capitalism or certain ways that capitalism will go on to develop. 

The key text for me maybe, that I tried to put it with was Henry David Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government, better known as Civil Disobedience, which was published the year after Communist Manifesto. And so it seems like it's an interesting historical parallel because on the one hand Thoreau comes across as being very anti-government, which seems to be the exact opposite of Marx and Engels, but he's also highly, highly critical of capitalism and the kind of individualism he's talking about is more in keeping with the kind of property that that both Andrew and Rosie have pointed out that Marx and Engels don't have any problem with. 

It also allows us to delve into some of the things that Rosie in particular has brought up in terms of questions of race and the larger capitalist system because, the context for Thoreau is he is protesting what he sees as the imperialistic war against Mexico, the funding of the defense of slavery and to lesser extent, the removal of Indians and really calling on people to rise up against that. But from a very individualist framework that provides an interesting twist on the kind of revolutionary rhetoric of Marx and Engels.

Rosie
Thank you, Paul. Like Andrew, I also love to connect this text with the Black Panthers 10 points, as well as bringing in the Young Lords, the idea that these points are not in their totality, but just things for us to think through when we're imagining a freer, more just society. I also have previously, I love doing this at Bard Newark in particular, but Robin D.G. Kelly is an amazing American studies historian. And so he wrote this brilliant book called Hammer and Hoe. And Hammer and Hoe really looks at Alabama communists during the Great Depression. It's really zeroing in on the labor, racial, and social history in Alabama and how Black communists organized around questions of labor. 

I also like to bring in visual sources. Squid Game has been especially fun for students. I've previously also taught Parasite as a companion text for Sequence in the past. 

And one other mention in terms of Sequence, I like to start our course with Marx and Engel's Manifesto because it allows us to focus on class power and capitalism. And then it sets a foundation for subsequent critiques. After that, at least this year, I've slid into Darwin's Descent of Man, and here we're thinking about human nature, evolution, science of inequality, and so then we're able to introduce frameworks that are anticipated later for Du Bois. After that, for third, I did Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, and here we're zeroing in on race, double consciousness, and historical memory. And by doing Souls of Black Folk, I can then bridge Marx, Darwin, and Freud. And lastly, we did Freud, Civilization, and it's Discontents. And here we were thinking through inner repression, guilt, and social cost. So adding a bit of a psychological depth to social theory. 

Maybe I'm also, because I'm a historian, of chronology kind of plays a role. But maybe one thing that I'd like to leave for students and thinking about what does this mean to us today and how do we connect the past to the present? I love the quote, "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs." And to me, this line encapsulates Marx and Engels' vision for a fully developed communist society or perhaps a more just world, especially for thinking through the lens of disability studies, indigenous studies, in which class divisions, private property, and exploitative labor relations have been abolished. And it describes an ideal of distribution based on human capacity and necessity, thinking about our needs rather than only our wants, and not commodifying our relationships, and not thinking about merit in terms of market value or inherited wealth.

Matt 
Thank you, Rosie. And that is a good place for us to come to a close. We did it. Congratulations. Thank you so much, Rosie, Andrew, and Paul. This has been really, really wonderful, an excellent, incredible conversation. I certainly think about some of the aspects of the Manifesto a bit differently after hearing some of your contributions. And so thank you very much for taking the time and for joining us today.

Rosie
Thank you, Matt. wait for the next podcast.

Paul 
Thanks, Matt.

Andrew 
Thank you.