Since May Day commemorates a significant step in “workers’ rights”; and since I have been exploring different manifestos, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at The Communist Manifesto – a document that ignited a revolution against obvious injustice and unfairness. But where are Marx and Engels now, and what about the ruins of their offspring?

Wherever Communism has spread, so has corruption, dictatorship, and new forms of injustice – – and let me be just as quick to add, “just like capitalism.” The difference is, this manifesto hearkened to some higher calling, some greater revolution with the intent of justice. Capitalism makes no such claim; it is easy to see that if let go to become feral, capitalism ruins every ecosystem and every economy just like communism.

In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s masterful and Pulitzer Prize award winning novel, “The Sympathizer”, we find the narrator/confessor endure the confusion of being a communist spy during the Vietnam War. He also endures torture at the hands of his comrades in the name of “re-education.” At the end of the novel, the narrator has nothing left but disturbing questions:

What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs?

Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others.

“Why?” indeed.

Because, I contend, neither Marx nor Engels accounted for the the coal vein of selfishness that runs through the heart of every person. Without this awareness, they could not account for the human tendency to contaminate and/or hoard whatever it so magnificently imagines.

(Consider how Nguyen’s questions can be asked just as easily of modern day revolutionaries: from the sexual revolution to the Islamic State.)

The History of Class Struggle?

It is a wonder that such a small worldview document captivated such an influential portion of the planet. History betrays though, that this is a philosophy too weak to hold up under the realities of the machinations of human nature and human greed.

The desire to redistribute the wealth at any cost only managed to redistribute the poverty where-ever it landed. It is ironic that embedded in its opening paragraphs is the awareness of how revolution ends in “the common ruin of the contending classes.”

Nothing to Lose?

With the open declaration that their ends can only be attained by “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”, is it any wonder that such a philosophy would be doomed to violent struggle repeated in every jurisdiction of its reach?

It is a groundless hope with false promises for the proletarian (the working class) to have “nothing to lose but their chains.”  Sadly, chains were not lost; new burdens were encumbered. What was lost in most cases were human dignity, motivation, and justice.

The Manifesto ends:

On February, April 19, 2019, the controversial Jordan Peterson debated Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek in Toronto. Peterson started with a critique of The Communist Manifesto, which is the central revolutionary document of the Marxist movement.