It's hard to know how to rate this. It is definitely an important thing to read. I have a better understanding of a lot of things now. This reads as a rallying call, especially the ending. There is also a very interesting section describing the communist party's relations to other political parties at the time. But probably the most interesting part is the beginning, the history of the world through the lens of class struggles. Marx is a master with words, and there are many passages that I noted to revisit and remember. He writes with grand, sweeping strokes that encompass huge areas. Sometimes this results in him seeming perhaps a bit too reductionist, but for the most part, somehow he gets away with it.

I think he was really onto something, but I disagree on one major point. He thought that the only possible solution for the unstable situation (where the bourgeoisie have power over the proletariat) was for the proletariat to get political power over the bourgeoisie. I think this is fundamentally too unstable. The bourgeoisie are, by definition, the proletariat's bosses. It doesn't work to be your boss's boss. Obviously, it also doesn't work for the bourgeoisie to have full power and the proletariat to starve, like what was happening across Europe in the 1840s. My theory is that the only stable solution is where the bourgeoisie and the proletariat share political power in a balance. And I think that if you look at the stable countries today--the ones that aren't dictatorships or oligarchies--they all have a mix of power being shared by these two classes.

There are no communist countries today, and perhaps never have or ever will be. The concept is fundamentally flawed in my opinion. The proletariat can't have all the political power for so many reasons. First, the bourgeoisie is naturally full of people who are good at managing, organizing, directing. That's how they got to be bourgeoisie. And they have experience on their side. The proletariat will never be able to compete in that area. Secondly, the bourgeoisie will never be content with not being in power because they are used to that. The best compromise can be to have them share their power, but to have them give it up completely? That's impossible to get them to agree to. And to simply completely do away with the bourgeoisie is also impossible. If you do get rid of them, then a new bourgeoisie rises up in their place, because someone has to manage. Marx advocated for centralizing power over capital in the state. In his model, the state simply becomes the new bourgeoisie. All of the bureaucrats that the state hires to run everything are now the new bourgeoisie and the same old problems arise. It just shuffles around the players.

Anyways. A totally different tact to take is to think about how to apply all of this to the modern world, which is quite a bit different from 180 years ago. In first world countries today, I don't know that the breakdown of proletariat and bourgeoisie really applies perfectly well to our society. I think our class system has gotten a lot more complex than that. And in some ways we have really gotten rid of a class system...but not entirely. I don't really have bandwidth to dive into trying to define such a system myself, but would be interested to read about it if anyone knows of a good model they have run across.