Karl Marx (1818–1883)

A whole lot of the historical background of this long essay went over my head- I must admit that my knowledge of 19th century French politics isn’t exactly broad. I came to this book from a podcast called “The Age of Napoleon” which deals with the subject of this book’s much more famous and consequential uncle. One episode features a discussion of this work by Marx and mentions that it may be a little hard for contemporary readers to “get” because Marx was writing about current events, and assumed that his readers would be up to date on the latest news coming out of France. However, for us, this news has been watered down by an extra century and a half of intervening history.

Even coming in so ignorant, there’s a lot to be had from this book. Something I never hear mentioned is how fun Marx is to read. He was a extremely talented writer (or polemicist, depending on your perspective) with great skill for a turn of phrase or an biting piece of wit to draw into contrast the absurdity of the social phenomena he is describing. Its also refreshing to read a brilliant thinker speaking with such confidence and passion about these issues - when reading Marx you feel like the right answer is so clear, so unavoidable, only by deliberate misdirection have we missed the mark. This is partially 19th century intellectual hubris, but I think it does show how impotent modern political discourse has become. It’s still shocking how radical his opinions were, and how so long ago he was presciently able to diagnose many problems we are still struggling to understand today. When you actually read Marx, you realize how misconstrued he has become, and how different the contemporary “left” in the USA is from the agenda he is putting forward. Case in point is his criticisms of taxes towards the back of the essay, which runs totally counter to the depiction of “liberals” in mainstream American discourse as spendthrifts always ready to raise taxes on the hard working people. In this book Marx articulates much the same criticism of big government as an American style conservative might, albeit with a much different endgame in mind. What were these taxes for? What were they going towards supporting? Would they actually improve the status of the working class or only to fund further distractions and misdirections to make it seem like the government was actually doing something? (It is after all the ultimate goal of classic Marxism to dissolve the state after the means of production has been secured by the workers) Always basing his work in hardcore research and study (evinced by the thousands of hours spent researching Das Kapital in the libraries of London), Marx, despite his reputation as an ideologue, always seeks the no bullshit, practical path forward. In this book we see him rail against meaningless political grandstanding in the service of obfuscating revolutionary energy. What Louis Napoleon was able to do, and what sets him directly in Marx’s sights, was skillfully manipulate (or take advantage of) the political winds blowing after the stymied revolutions of 1848. By playing all sides against each other, and using the powers of office to put forward the most pandering political projects that would ultimately do nothing to improve the situation of the working class, Napoleon III was able to enrich himself, his cronies, and the entire bourgeois class that profited from “stability” at any cost.… (mere)

This is one of those great books that takes feelings and intuitions you’ve had your whole life and explains them better than you ever could have. These kind of books also can be ones that you put off reading forever because they are so ingrained in our culture that they can seem obvious. In my experience, it’s usually worth going back to read that kind of book, as I’m often surprised at how vibrant is the spark of genius that made it a classic in the first place.

If you want to be cliché, you can criticize this book for being boring or pedantic, but I think that would be underestimating the task that Marx is undertaking. Sure there are parts that are dry, but Marx is encouraging us to look at society from a granular level. After all, many of the concepts he is critiquing or outright refuting are taught to most of us when we are still children. What is money? What is a job? Why are some people rich and some people poor? If a child asks you this you may be tempted to fall back on some hollow explanation, or even just pat them on the head and say “that’s just how it is”. Of course what makes Marx a visionary is he isn’t content with either of these options. You can see why Marx would feel compelled to flesh out his ideas with mathematical formulas and endless examples; he knew that his critics would come at him exactly with this kind of ammunition. And yet the most compelling parts of this book are the simple concepts that make you think, why did I never see it that way before? If you get through the first few hundreds pages of him explaining what is a commodity, you will realize it boils down to this: money is a physical representation of a relationship between people, no more no less. Therefore the price of a given thing is based upon how much time was needed to bring that thing into existence, spent by a person or group of people with which you are conjugating a relationship of exchange. As simple as this sounds, it’s a bolt from the blue in a world where we are actively encouraged to forget what money really is. A classic stoner thought is “money isn’t even real”. Of course it is, but it’s definitely not what we’ve all grown up assuming it is. This is just one example of many simple observations in this book that made it so revolutionary.

Another thing to know, is that Marx’s writing is actually full of personality, and sometimes even deigns to a kind of hyperdroll black humor. You can feel his incredulity as he lays out how the capitalist class has (and will) pushed humanity into a new kind of hell, as if he too is shocked and appalled by what he is writing. Some readers may complain that his many examples of contemporaneous abuses by the capitalist class are out of date, but I’d encourage the reader to follow these threads to the present day. We no longer have child labor in the west, but one of capitalism’s strongest points is it’s ability to absorb criticism into itself and find ways to continue making profits. Marx is once again ahead of the curve in having little hope that “regulation” with have any real effect on the real situation. We live in a world now where capitalist abuses are on going, they are just covered with a thick film of what passes for “decency”.… (mere)

Jones does a great job contextualizing the Manifesto beforehand (with a whopping 184-page introduction, not to mention footnotes for the actual text of the Manifesto), and connects the reader to many other philosophers and social theorists in Marx's influential circle. In fact, this edition seems more like a history book than simply another published copy of the Manifesto. As for Marx, his opinions on the harm of capitalism are very well elucidated, but when it comes to his solutions, they are very vague and seem to be merely based on what happened in the French Revolution. His thoughts on capitalism make it all worth it, however, and thus I will move on to his other works, especially [b:Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844|85954|Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844|Karl Marx|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521042866l/85954._SY75_.jpg|82945].… (mere)