New Edition of Marx's "Communist Manifesto" Explores Its Contemporary Relevance

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society...All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”

Karl Marx and Frederick Engel
The Communist Manifesto

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Capitalism encourages greed, competition and aggression. It degrades human relations so that they are frequently based, as the Manifesto notes, on little more than “naked self-interest” and “callous ‘cash payment.’”

So it’s little wonder that, as economist Juliet Schor wrote, “Thirty percent of [American] adults say that they experience high stress nearly every day; even higher numbers report high stress once or twice a week...Americans are literally working themselves to death--as jobs contribute to heart disease, hypertension, gastric problems, depression, exhaustion, and a variety of other ailments.”

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CAN A book published over 150 years ago still be relevant to understanding and changing the world today? PHIL GASPER, the editor of a new edition of the Communist Manifesto packed with annotations and additional materials, talks about the continuing importance of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ most famous work.

Read more about the new edition of the Communist Manifesto and "free market" economics in the current edition of the
Socialist Worker.

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