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CLXVII's avatar

First of all, thanks for this surprise, as I otherwise probably wouldn’t have read the Communist Manifesto anytime soon, extrapolating from my previous lack of direct Marx-reading.

I definitely didn’t expect, going into this, that I’d have Marx selling me on the goodness of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, but that somehow ended up happening (in section 1, mainly).

One particular thing that caught my attention was how confidently Malthusian Marx seemed to be, confident that the wages of the proletariat would be pushed down to subsistence, making proletarian accumulation of (bourgeois) property impossible. I guess he can’t be faulted *too* much for that though, as in 1848 the falling part of the demographic transition hadn’t even happened yet. (I wonder if anyone in that time period *was* able to successfully predict it?)

Likewise it was interesting to read his view on the economic cycle, and how he fixated on the idea of ‘an excess of goods’, rather than a shortage of demand. Again, I’m not quite sure how much I should blame him for it, as he was writing the better part of a century before Keynes did his thing.

It’s a shame that he wrote so little about bourgeois socialism, as that seems to me to be the intellectual thread that is most shared with more modern, reformist socialist (and social democrat, and...) movements.

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