The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

My issue with this book isn't so much the ideas it presents but the way in which it presents them. It's very short and pretty readable even for the economically uneducated, but it exists in this form because it's a classist call-to-action to those not educated enough to see past its persuasiveness. And I despise that about it.

This book wasn't created to teach, it was created to galvanize. It's what people think the Bible and the Qu'ran and every other religious text are: The Manifesto is, more than anything, a call to commit aggressive violence. I can't say whether Marx wrote it to be self-serving or whether he truly believed it would benefit the human condition. Cynically, I prefer to believe the former. Either way, The Communist Manifesto, like Mein Kampf before it, is a book that's worth reading so you're better equipped to disarm its tactics and counter its ideas.

My final, petty revenge on The Communist Manifesto is purchasing this stupidly pretty Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, clocking in at a scant 112 pages, for a whole $15, when I could have just downloaded it for free anywhere since it's in the public domain. I was free to determine that the value of this pretty paper copy of the book was worth the money, so I gave a bunch of bourgeois pigs some of my money I earned in exchange for selling my labor and The Communist Manifesto arrived on my doorstep two days later.

Ain't Capitalism grand?

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