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#nowreading The Communist Manifesto: https://t.co/wm8gUH50Fl
"In 1887, the manuscript of an Armenian translation was offered to a publisher in Constantinople. But the good man did not have the courage to publish something bearing the name of Marx, & suggested that the translator set down his own name as author, which the latter declined."
"Today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat mobilized for the first time, as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard 8 hour working day to be established by legal enactment." - Engels, 1890
"Dante was both the last post of the Middle Ages and the first post of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?" - Engels, 1893, preface to Italian edition
(For convenience, I'm going to shorten Bourgeois to B and Proletarians to P.) "The modern B society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonists. It has but established new classes, conditions of oppression, forms of struggle."
"The B, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations [...] it has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation."
"The B has subjected the country to the rules of towns. It has created enormous cities, greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." 🤔
"How does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? [...] by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented." https://t.co/zmaNgifXwN
Interesting point and something I've noticed in conversations about race and gender - "centrists" fight against "extremists", solidifying and consolidating their position https://t.co/uNxsYNcAIX
"All property relations in the past have continually been subject to hidyotical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property." https://t.co/FAUr1DCiWR
"The B sees their wives as mere instruments of production. Our B's, not content with having wives and daughters of the P's at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives."
"Man's ideas, views [...] his consciousness changes with every change in the condition of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life. Intellectual production changes it's character in proportion as material production is changed."
"Has not Christianity reclaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of this, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church?" https://t.co/2naaGYG0nl
"Communism has only arisen since machinery and other inventions made it possible [...] Communism is the theory of a liberation which was not possible for the slaves, serfs or handicraftsmen, but only for the proletarians. It belongs to the 19th century; was not possible before."
A thing that I took away from reading the communist manifesto was that Marx and Engels would not have had a problem with using iPhones and Facebook to organize for better working conditions; they were more practical than they're often portrayed (see prev tweet)