Why Read the Communist Manifesto Today?
Rodolfo Torres, Education M 7-7:50pm, Berkeley Place 2001A Course Code 87581 Nineteen ninety-eight was the 150th anniversary of the publication of the “Manifesto.” Apart from Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ slim pamphlet is considered the most important work of nonfiction written in the 19th century. This freshman seminar is intended as an introduction to Marxist thinking. It introduces a way to think about history, about the present, about social and economic relations. If there is a central assumption that guides this seminar, it is that the human world as we know it-the world of money, things, social relations, environmental relations, etc.-is not natural, or commonsensical, or in any way determined by forces external to humans. Humans made the world, and I hope in Marx’s analysis to show ways to think about that making. One of the central questions of this seminar is , after the collapse of communism , what if anything is the legacy of the “Com
