Penguin Great Ideas

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You have nothing to lose but your sanity - Rated
Being a firm believer in only arguing on subjects you know about, I had hoped that this edition of the Communist Manifesto would fire up the old brain cells and be enjoyable as well. Unfortunatly, it seems that Penguin decided to try and bamboozle as many people as possible.

The slim volume is mostly taken up with introductions to every Eastern European edition printed and a separate piece by Karl Marx which was not part of the original Manifesto. The Manifesto istelf is only a few pages long - fair enough, seing as how it was only ever intended to be a pamphlet, not a book to be shown off and admired. But the revolutionary text which shaped so much of the modern world is sandwiched between repetition and ramblings, with no hint of Russian or Chinese background, no annotation and no mention of the impact these few pages had on society, save for a brief mention by Engels in one of the later prefaces.

The Manifesto is very interesting to read with hindsight, and makes some cohesive and thought-inducing points about the distribution of power in society, but as a whole is quite idealistic and unpractical, making it quite heavy-going.

Interesting when read as a supplement to prior knowledge about the politcal climates of the early 20th century, this edition of the Communist Manifesto is useful for scholars and those who can concentrate, simplify, think and criticize at the same time.