The Communist Manifesto

I'm currently auditing an online lecture series by historian Timothy Snyder on Hitler and Stalin. The most recent lecture was on Communism. Snyder recommends that his students read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. It's mercifully short and the Kindle version cost 99 cents, so I read it. 

As I say, it's short and cheap, so although I found it a complete waste of time and money, the damage was modest. I realize it's a manifesto, not a work of scholarship, but the polemical reliance on assertions and the poverty of evidence for them is certainly an affront to my intellect. I guess I'm not the intended audience, Then there's the fact that it didn't age well. The claim that Germany was particularly ripe for a communist revolution is risible in light of the fact that millions of German workers supported the Kaiser and later Hitler. And, there's the enormities that were the starvation, suffering and death of tens of millions in the "communist" worker's paradises of Stalin and Mao, both of whom claimed to follow Marx. Finally, the writing, far from being inspirational, is turgid and dull. If you've ever considered being a Communist, this will cure you.

One doesn't have to be blind to the harms of global capitalism and neoliberalism to note that The Communist Manifesto is a quaint historical relic that provides no guide to action for today's proletariat. Like Moby-Dick, I read it out of a sense of duty. The good news is that The Communist Manifest is way shorter.