THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO SUMMARY | Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels explained with quotes

A summary of the communist manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is given. Quotes and page numbers are provided as well.

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WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

[anomalouspixels]

Being subjected to consumerist and materialist ads while watching this excellent summary is kind of perfect.

[CultWhatever]

Bro I just spent two months reading about historical materialism, still not knowing wtf Marx was talking about, and this dude explained it perfectly in minutes

[LibertarianLeninistRants]

that is exactly what I imagined as the perfect introduction video - no theory aside from the absolute basics, but complete enough to give a good picture, all in combination with great animation! thank you very much, I will share this wherever I can

[Luis-vxtx]

I just want to give you mad credit man. You explained something that takes entire semesters in 13 min with clarity.

[Dorian_sapiens]

I haven't heard a clearer explanation of the transition from the lower to higher phase, from "from each according to their contribution" to "from each according to their need" than in this video.

[therealbrappuccino]

love the Red Alert 3 lo fi Soviet March in the background

[thomychicas]

Don’t lie, you’re here because your hw is due today/tonight

[TheScourge]

Excellent summary of the Manifesto!

One tangential point however is that the Manifesto's tracing of the origins of capitalism is a bit controversial in modern marxist/historical materialist thought. The key point being that the manifesto puts the origin point and the driving class as being in the cities. An alternative view is expressed by Ellen Meiskins Wood in her work "The Origin of Capitalism", which notes that capitalism arose specifically in England first and spread from there, but at the origin point England wasn't the most urbanized or biggest hub of commerce (the nearby Netherlands were and, though coming up with innovations of corporate forms capitalism would later use, did not really abolish feudal relations there).

To summarize her argument, England had a unique system of feudalism where aristocrats had relatively weak extra-economic powers (aka they couldn't use direct violence or the law to extract wealth as much as their continental peers), but gained much stronger economic control of the land (aka they were able to get rid of traditional peasant use rights and the common land, exercising full private control of the land like it was personal property). This led them to be able to kick people off the land easier which created a rental market for land. The renters became early capitalists trying to improve the profitability of the land (in marxist terms, maximizing exchange value not use value) including hiring dispossessed peasants as wage workers to exploit. This began the capitalist development of the means of production in the countryside as capitalist tenant farmers competed to make their land more productive in order to afford the rents their landlords charged and landlords encouraged this so that they could get higher rents. The cities only began developing capitalist relations as the losers of these competitions (the majority of the peasants) got kicked off their traditional lands and flooded into the cities, which enabled bourgeois capitalists to use this abundance of labor to break the old guild system. The bourgeois capitalists (who are only a section of the bourgeois town dwellers who are hiring all these cheap wage laborers as opposed to old bourgeois guild folks or bourgeois professionals like lawyers/doctors, what modern social media dorks might call "PMCs") further capitalist development by revolutionizing manufacturing which has much more potential for growth than farming in the countryside did. As this process continued, the British state found itself capable of raising far more revenues than it's European rivals and started kicking their asses at warfare despite previously being a pretty marginal power. This drove these other European states to try to deliberately copy British capitalism, particularly for the manufacturing side since that's where the most value could be created which by the 19th century made it appear that capitalism was about bourgeois development, hence where the Manifesto came up with it's order of development (cities->countryside rather than the reverse).

Wood has good examples and arguments in her book for this based on a historical materialist method and is an example of why Marxism is about the method Marx developed, not his precise conclusions in his works. None of this is a criticism of the video of course since that is about explaining the Manifesto, but this is just an interesting example of some of the debates that can happen using the methods of historical analysis outlined by Marx and Engels.

[Quantum_Cowboy]

I was still having a hard time grasping the fundamentals of what communism is but this video really helped!

[Furore]

Sadly I was too drunk to really grasp all this in but

[kageedit]

Some other Marxists to watch
hakim
thefinnishbolshevik
azurescapegoat
Vikki 1999

[DanieleCapellini]

on a more serious note, could you add subtitles to the videos? would love to translate them, but doing it from voice alone is much harder than from subtitles

[jovenintensa]

The eyeballs are appeased with this wonderful content!

[kentonjoegibsonii]

I learned more by listening to this about captialism than I did about communism. I don't see why this writer is so hated. I get tired of working for shit wage on a job that is going to kill me half the time. I am a welder like my grandfather. 4th Gen welder.

[krymz]

the image with the circles, the one on the outside preventing the one inside from growing further, was a really nice way of showing it. Even if I understood the concept, I feel like I understand it *more* now.

[schwiftyfish]

We need more videos bro your awesome seriously you are great at explaining things clearly and I enjoy your use of visual aids and comedy haha. Keep it up bro your doing great work

[dootdoot]

AH YOU’RE EXPLAINING IS PERFECT FOR MY BRAIN

[smileyp]

Hey! This video would benefit from the youtube chapter feature, which splits up the video into parts by (I think) putting time stamps and 'chapter' names in the discription.

It would make revisiting certain parts of this video in the future for reference much easier! Thank you for making it

[nonono]

I would suggest starting with Principles of communism by Engels, because it does a good job of explaining what the basic terms used in most other work (like proletariat) means.

[deltap]

I remember my elementary school teacher telling us communism was evil, associating it with the fascism of Nazi Germany, Stalin, and Mussolini.