The Communist Manifesto Analysis

The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. Marx claims his analysis of class struggle explained "all hitherto existing society" (Section1.1)—in other words, all history up to and including 18...

Marx writes as if he knows everything, and he pretty much thinks he does. That pretty much qualifies him as an omniscient or all-knowing narrator in our book. And although there are no fictional ch...

This is no fairy tale or science fiction story. Marx means business—well, okay, maybe not business. What we're saying is that he's dead serious in this political manifesto, telling workers to rev...

Three words do a darn good job of describing Marx's attitude in the Manifesto. Provocative, angry, and optimistic. Works well for a manifesto, if you ask us.Karl isn't here to be your sweetheart. H...

Ol' Karl is full of rhetorical devices. After all, the whole point of this manifesto is to incite millions of workers to overthrow the rich, and it's a lot easier to do that if you can woo them wit...

Communist Manifesto—that's a pretty straightforward—and now infamous—title. Check: it's a manifesto, a document publicly announcing the author's goals and the reasons behind those goals. Chec...

The ending of the Manifesto is what marketers would term a call-to-action: the part of an advertisement that asks the audience to take specific steps. Except this is no advertisement. This manifest...

We're not gonna lie: the Manifesto ain't easy. For one thing, Marx comes up with some fairly abstract concepts, such as wage-labor and capital. Understanding all the concepts and how they relate ta...

The Manifesto picks up the story of the workers as European serfdom comes to its dying gasp around the 18th century or so. It's a time period (in a galaxy far, far away...) when the bourgeoisie is...

The bourgeoisie is oppressing the proletariat, subjecting them to horrible working conditions in cramped factories. Individual laborers get the idea to rebel, one by one.The rebellion spreads fro...

Feudalism collapses; the bourgeoisie becomes the most powerful class, and the aristocracy fades away. But the bourgeoisie is oppressing the proletariat (the workers). The workers begin rebelling.T...

According to Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, displeased with interpretations of his work in France, said, "If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist." (Source.) Remember Engels, Mar...

Sex shows up only briefly in the Manifesto, but it makes kind of a splash when it does.Marx writes that the whole bourgeoisie screams in chorus against the supposed communist view on what he calls...

Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (Section 3.14). French economist.Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Philosophie de la Misère (Section3.38). French anarchist philosopher.François-Noël Babeuf (Section3.44)...