In my Humanities class, we read “The Communist Manifesto.” Luckily, for my final paper I get to write a critique of Marx’s manifesto. I have found a ton of material on here that talk about Marx. The one problem: there is a ton of material and I don’t have a ton of time.
What would you best recommend me reading over to get an overview of Marx’s ideas? Are there any books/lectures that specifically talk about “The Communist Manifesto”?
Thanks much to everyone!
Go to the “Literature” section and do a search for “Marx”.
I’ve done that already. I have hours of lectures and 1000’s of pages that I could read, I was just wondering which one’s you guys would recommend as the most concise and precise responses to “The Communist Manifesto.” I hope to read through all the stuff I’ve found at some point, but the paper is due Monday, so I don’t have time to read it all now.
Read Mises’ Theory and History. It has large sections dealing directly with Marx.
I would look in the chapter on Socialism and the calculation problem in Human action. Also, I would take some of Mises’ writings and do text searches for “Marx”. You may find different responses by Mises to different myths propagated by Karl Marx scattered throughout his writings. Try for example essays such as “planned chaos” and “profit & loss”. Or books like “Omnipotent government” or even “Human action” itself. You may be able to find excellent quotes by Mises that summarize many of the myths and their refutations of Karl Marx.
BTW, why not suggest to the Professor to read a Mises classic such as “omnipotent government” or even a shorter essay such as “planned chaos” for your Humanities class. Let the students judge for themselves who is really more of a humanist; Marx or Mises.
Marxism - A Materials List
I knew this thing would come in handy.
Anti-humanities
Here are some topics within the paper itself that you can discuss:
The immiseration of the workers [ which didn’t happen ]
The exacerbation of individuals into two groups: Proletariat and Bourgeois [ which didn’t happen ]
Why Marx labeled previous socialists with the term ‘utopian’ [ because they didn’t have a historical ‘scientific’ approach and since the science of Marxism has failed then by his own definition Marx too is a utopian ]
Highlight that Marx labeled the epoch of the bourgeois [ Capitalism ] as one of ’ Free trade, Free buying and selling ’ yet then went onto to announce that the bourgeois retain their power through the state apparatus.
We could get into class conflict but how long is this paper going to be?
Thanks a lot for all the suggestions! Good thing my torrent of all the books off of the Mises Institute in pdf form finished over the weekend.
The paper can only be 6-8 pages long. Right now, in the most general sense, I want to cover class struggles, exploitation theory and the labor theory of value. Where did Marx label previous socialists as utopian? Because that is a great point. I especially like the last point you made: Marx argued that it was unfair for the bourgeois to use state power, so the solution is to let the workers control state power, rather than remove all state power? Never understood that.
The last section. He talked about ‘German Socialism’ ‘Bourgeois Socialism’ ‘Utopian Socialism’ etc. He was mainly discussing people like Robert Owen, Proudhon and Saint-Simon.
David Gordon offers a pithy critique of the LTV in his Introduction to Economic Reasoning.
It’s also a great book for understanding the basis of Austrian economics. I got mine autographed. Dr. Gordon is very smart but very reserved. He is a good humorist though.
Rothbard absolutely trounces Marx in the second volume of “An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought.”
I’m sorry I can’t help you… But can you throw in that in alot of ways Marx was the biggest hypocrits in history?
Born a jew, hated jews, spent alot of his young life defending religeon, became radical athiest who attacked religeon, spent the lass 20 years of his life in the top 2% of English society while writing Das Kapital, worked with a man who owned a textile mill and treated his workers as crappily as everyone else, hated exploitation but exploited everyone around him (all of his children who didn’t die of uneccisary malnutrition died of sucide) , hated the bourgeois, was a prominent bourgeois for most of his life, had contradicting capitalist definitions
Nice! Until now I was unaware of this book. I just skimmed the section on LTV and it’s great stuff. This would also be a great introductory “textbook”. I’ll have to add it to my library 
In Marxism Unmasked, Mises says that Marx had to add “When the time comes, some members of the bourgeoisie join the rising classes” to the Communist Manifesto. He made a very good point off of it, but I can’t find the quote anywhere in the book. Where is it or was he just paraphrasing?
Well that is another contradiction because in the Communist Manifesto and Marxism at large says that our behavior is governed by the forces of production we are born into, therefore bourgeois will always be bourgeois and the proletariat will remain as such until the revolution. Perhaps Mises meant the petite-bourgeois which is kind of like the middle class. They are supposedly meant to be pushed into either full bourgeois or proletariat.
If any of you guys are really interested in reading my paper here is a link to where you can download it: http://rapidshare.com/files/321455708/3rd_Paper.html
I figured I would at least let you guys see it since you gave me so much help on it. Thanks to everyone again! I got the grade back on it already. I got 18/20. I got 2 points off mostly because I was “too hard” on Marx. I didn’t see it from his view point and from his time period enough. Ugh.
Congrats! [:)]
I downloaded, but could not open it though.. what is it? Pdf? doc?
It probably wouldn’t work because my Mac saves it as a .docx file. Its what works best on my Mac. Sorry. Here’s a link to a .doc version of the paper. It should work on Windows.