1. I found the bit about proles potentially being worse off than slaves strange. His predictions about England/France leading the revolution turned out to be incorrect. There was definitely also an undertone of euro-centric elitism in the text. The way he described the ‘civilized’ Europeans spreading technology to the ‘barbarous’ nations is definitely problematic in its framing. This was the knowledge of the time of 1800’s Europe, so reading it today we need to keep that perspective, that doesn’t excuse it though. Engels, in this regard, was definitely a man of his time.
2. I thought that the text was very clear and to the point, it left no room for vague interpretation. Clearly explaining the origins of: Proletarians, bourgeoisie, the industrial revolution, comparing proles to other types of workers, the means of production, capitalism’s impact on society, technology, globalization, and periodic market crashes. I like how he really emphasized the roles of competition and private property as key features of the capitalist system. How he explains in grotesque detail how they use all of these things to crush the workers.
3. I think mostly all of the themes hold true today. If Engels were to see the state of the world, he’d be shocked at how accurate he was with the far majority of his predictions. The development of globalization and technology’s impact on modern capitalism would probably blow his mind.

I don’t think my analysis will fall into “What is good/bad” so I’ll just do a point by point on what I find interesting. I was also not sure which one to reply to, so I went to the original cross-post. I think these could be posted on Wednesday night or very early in the morning depending on your timezone to keep the “Thursday” effect longer (though I understand the grad was down today).

1. What is Communism

Right off the get go, Marx throws a wrench into all future anarcholiberal definitions of communism as “the stateless classless society” to claim that “communism was never tried”. If you just understand communism as that simple sentence instead, all “so and so isn’t actually communist” arguments fall apart.

2-5. Proletariat and origins

The history is pretty spot on for the European proletariat at the time, and extends seamlessly into the development of the global proletariat later on in the timeline. It also does not account but apply to other services that are now the capitalist bread and butter, like delivery/warehouse services such as Amazon, but is still applicable for them.

6. Classes before industrial revolution

Here Marx shows his age and Europeanness, with generalist assumptions about ancient societies and barely even mention of the native non-European ones. Although they are today understood to be incorrect (i.e. slavery not being the only nor the majority working class in many civilisations he would describe as from antiquity), he is sadly not alive for us to correct him nowadays, and we need to understand this as a byproduct of his time and general European worldview. It seems like one quote that would be used for MarxistDebunkerxxx69.

7-10. Differences of the proletarian to other prominent working classes

He draws a compelling picture of how the modern proletarian as a class is unique from those that have existed in the past, and specially as the majority class for workers. From memory, I think at his time they weren’t even actually the majority in most of Europe, but after mechanical agriculture and the rural exodus peasant populations hardly even reach 50% in most “developed” countries.

The issue with the slaves is an interesting one. His dry writing does give the impression that slaves “have it better” than proles, but what I think he was point at there is that the conflict of the slave is an individual one (that is from the slave to the master), while that of the proletarian is a class one. If a slave successfully flees from their master or kills them, they are immediately free until the state intervenes, and if no such intervention comes they can even sustain themselves with the same means of production and skills that they used as slaves. Abolishing slavery can end slavery, but single slaves can also individually have their individual slavery abolished by a variety of means. The reality of abolition without communism, as was demonstrated in Brazil later is that lots of them became rural proletarians just as he predicted. Although in theory their rights improved, “slavery by another name” continued for a very long time and is still considered to exist these days in some forms.

A proletarian on the other hand would not be freed by fleeing as they would not have either the skills nor the means to survive by themselves. Since they are not personally owned as individuals, they must submit themselves to (wage) slavery rather than the other way around and because of that can be readily replaced without the capitalist losing as much as a cent (in Marx’s time there was no severance, nor is there in some states in the USA today). Slaves are captured and created, but proletarians must capture and create themselves. Obviously though, the vast majority of proletarians today have much better standards of living than the vast majority of slaves of his time, but that is in large part due to organised labour fights for those rights, and it doesn’t necessarily cover positions historically occupied by slaves such as prison labour, manual sugar cutting or rural housekeeper.

11. Marx does some geopolitics

His pamphlets are usually very weird on geopolitics, specially future predictions. Ironically most successful revolutions that followed were instead on those same “semi-barbaric” countries for many conditions that were just not there in Europe. By his time Haiti had already expelled the French and ended slavery (which was an integral to the maintaining capitalism in Europe), and this wave of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolutions outside of “The West” has never stopped to this day. It is easier to want to kill your oppressors when they are capitalists and Germanic.

12. Marx predicts the following 2 centuries

No comment necessary.

Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by general revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things.

13. What follows from these periodic commercial crises?

Marx ever the hopeful. While I agree that capitalism keeps inventing things that can help end capitalism (like automated machineguns the internet), this also fails to predict how portions of the working class can and have been co-opted by capital specifically to prevent this abolishment. The capitalist are so incredibly wealthy that they can afford to pay a quarter of society double to keep the other three quarters down.

Overall a cool introductory text. I was going to ask why we we’re doing only half of it, but the size of my reply answers that question.