Copies of The Communist Manifesto in Print Worldwide
Well, I tried Googling the above and got nowhere. Though I did find a lot of fairly creepy conservative blogs and websites. These either said the Manifesto has been responsible for most of the evil in the world since it was published, which attributes huge power to a short document; or they said, "Communism is utterly irrelevant, trivial and gone. We don't need to think about it ever again."
posted by Eleanor at 7:07 AM
2 Comments:
And you have to wonder how many of them have actually read the Manifesto. I used to make my World Lit nd Victoria Lit students read parts of it --hardly any of them were literate enough to handle the whole thing -- and they would get deeply uneasy at how much of it they agreed with.
I've been thinking about the "marxism is dead" issue quite a bit, and while it is undeniably true that marxism as a state form is not doing particularly well, marxisim as a set of analytical tool is doing well enough.
It's interesting that Ryman doesn't dismiss the other major intellectual of the 19th century: Darwin. Marx is very much the Darwin of the social sciences.
Without Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection as a "unified field theory" that constituted a new science (biology), we are left with a hodegpodge series of unrelated sciences: descriptive and classificatory sciences, such as anatomy, histology, microbiology, and natural history, zoology, botany, as well as experimental sciences, such as physiology.
Without historical materialism as a framework for the social sciences, we are left with a series of disarticulated fields of study such as "economics", "political science", "sociology", "anthropology" and so on -- or even worse, the hodgepodge post-modern equivalent of 19th Century taxonomy and natural history: "cultural studies". --TG
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