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The Communist Manifesto — Not What You Think It Is
The Communist Manifesto, like the Bible, the Qur’an, and The Origin of Species, falls into that category of books that are more discussed than read. Many people feel entitled to hold an opinion about each of those without having read them or even having held a copy in their hands. This is because when a book becomes a symbol of a social movement or a belief system, one’s opinion of what the book represents takes precedence over the book itself.
However, there’s no excuse in this case. The Communist Manifesto is barely 50 pages, and while the references may be somewhat outdated, they shouldn’t be obscure to a reasonably educated reader. I confess that I first read it in high school, primarily out of a desire to be edgy and provocative, and hardly understood any of it. It does require at least a rudimentary knowledge of European history, and the version I have now (the Penguin Classics edition), like the one I encountered in high school, is just the text of the work itself — no preface, no interpretive essays, no mini-biographies of Marx and Engels, no references or footnotes. If you want background and explication, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
