A Critique of the Manifesto and the Marxist Doctrine (1st of 2 Parts)

I've already been introduced to the foundations of conflict theory early in my career, though up to now it still stands short of influencing the basis of my beliefs, and the only attention it has gotten from me is curiosity about its persistent presence in historical movements and philosophies taking shape and looming during our time. Karl Marx is undeniably instrumental to the blossoming of the Communist ideology, and for centuries the same 'spectre' still haunts the world, finding upon its furtive path a considerable following.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party (commonly known as the Communist Manifesto) did not have a small part in its process. Co-authored by two of the world's most influential (or controversial) political philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels during the prime of their youth, the Manifesto had become the bible of the then nascent Communist League. From a materialist's standpoint the Manifesto holds that the history of societies is a history of class struggles, citing what Marx viewed was the periodic conflict between “free man and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journey man, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” Marx, to whom Engels attributed much of the authorship of the Manifesto, winded down all of European history into a series of revolutionary oppositions, social and economic, from the bourgeois uprising which destroyed the aristocracy, to the rise of the bourgeoisie and the Modern Industry (the child of the Industrial Revolution) and finally the overpowering enslavement of the silent proletarian (working class). He mentions that the bourgeoisie had simplified the classes into two, that of themselves and the proletariat. [Read more...]