Random book from our personal library.
This is one of those books I had to add to our collection in solidarity with fellow workers, but also because it was about the English, was published by Penguin Classics, and, if I'm honest, because it was inexpensive.
pick3.5 Stars: Rating based on introduction and not actual manifesto. 80%+ is commentary on the (surprising to me) short manifesto by Marx. I found the introduction informative and it gave good backstory to what lead up to Marx‘s writing.
pickGreat analysis of the overthrow of bourgeois society by the people and its eventual suppression by the collusion of Prussia and the French government.
Recent acquisitions:
📖 Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin
📖 On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
“All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.” (The Communist Manifesto)
so-soIt's fine. At this point in history the Communist Manifesto is more of a novelty than anything else. Discovering that about a third of this plus-sized pamphlet is devoted to shit-talking other leftists really drove home that nothing in it was new or scary even at the time. The Communist Manifesto is, upon inspection, revealed as really nothing more than a single piece of a long running, much more widespread conversation.
pickChange the system, not the climate.
An accessible introduction to the idea of ecosocialism. Makes clear that capitalism cannot be made environmentally friendly, nor can leftist/neoliberal governments who are backing corporations/capitalism, no matter how many green washing initiatives are advertised, an obvious conclusion given decades of international environmental conferences without seeing meaningful reduction in carbon emissions, etc. 1/?
