A World to Win: Essays on the Communist Manifesto

Front Cover
Prakash Karat
LeftWord Books, 2011 - 149 pages
It has been more influential in the making of the modern world than any other piece of political writing. Rarely has call to arms been phrased in a language of such zest, beauty and purity. One hundred and fifty years after it was written, the Manifesto shows us an image of our own, present-day globalized capitalism with stunning clarity and accuracy. Edited, with an introduction, by Prakash Karat, the present volume contains essays by three of India's foremost Marxist scholars, Aijaz Ahmad, Irfan Habib and Prabhat Patnaik, who explain the relevance of the Manifesto in terms of Marxist theory and praxis. The volume also contains the complete text of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Preface to the English Edition of 1888 by Frederick Engels, and a note on the publishing history of the Manifesto in India.
 

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Page 103 - In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Page 42 - In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
Page 98 - ... more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious ; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades...
Page 94 - In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem...
Page 99 - The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.
Page 89 - The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Page 110 - Nevertheless in the most advanced countries the following will be pretty generally applicable : 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly 6.
Page 95 - The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property. On the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions by which they are fettered, and...
Page 107 - The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents ? To this crime we plead guilty.
Page 108 - Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas^ views, and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed ? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

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