Leftist Reading: The Communist Manifesto, Part One

Leftist Reading

This episode’s reading is part 1 of the Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

Available online here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31193

Intro and outro music is Decisions by Eric Matyas
Available at soundimage.org

Part 1 - This episode:

Introduction – 0:56
I Bourgeois and Proletarians - 2:20

Part 2:
II Proletarians and Communists

Part 3:
III Socialist and Communist Literature
IV Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties

Footnotes:

1 (2:15)
By bourgeoisie it’s meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live.

2 (2:23)
That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or to have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland.
The inner organization of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true nature of the Gens and its relation to the Tribe. With the dissolution of these primaeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes.

3 (2:32)
Guildmaster, that is a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild.

4 (28:10)
"Commune" was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters, local self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate."
Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France.