August 2019

Mr Marx had his points though about capitalism which are becoming blatantly clear now, that most communist experiments are gone down the drain: property and money are getting into fewer and fewer hands and the rest of us have less and less. I doubt his ideas are dead yet…

April 2015

It’s Tuesday again and therefore I tease you a little with one of my actual reads. I have chosen another German immigrant from many, many years ago: Karl Marx and his “The Communist Manifesto”.

It is a tough read: Old-fashioned language and of course if you read it in today’s world you have all the failed communist experiments all over the world in your mind. In my opinion, there are a lot of assumptions that Marx did about working class people and how humans would react if there is no private property anymore.

I have always believed that Marx had a very positive image about humans: If only the bourgeoisie, it’s oppression and private property is gone humankind will let go of all deception and personal gain and everybody will have what they need. Well, history has shown that communist countries created even more oppression on the working class and the communist leaders lived a life in luxury which Marx clearly had not in mind.

One could say of course that that was not pure communism yet but that way it would not work anyway I believe. But I love his idea of a fair life for all, where everybody has what they need and find work at their abilities. For me, it is still the question how to achieve that though. I would certainly take into consideration that people are quite selfish and as Brecht put it: “Food is the first thing, morals follow on”. Well, even that does not always work.

As I said above it is a tough read as the language is very old-fashioned but I believe one needs to know what they are talking about. So if I want to talk about the communist idea I need to read his works.

But enough explanation. Here is my quote:

“The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.”

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“Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!”