The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx · Friedrich Engels

Oct 2017 · Author's Republic · Narrated by Matt Montanez

About this audiobook

The Communist Manifesto was conceived as an outline of the basic beliefs of the Communist movement. The authors believed that the European Powers were universally afraid of the nascent movement, and were condemning as "communist," people or activities that did not actually conform to what the Communists believed. This Manifesto, then, became a manual for their beliefs.





In it we find Marx and Engel's rehearsal of the idea that Capital has stolen away the work of the artisan and peasant by building up factories to produce goods cheaply. The efficiency of Capital depends, then, on the wage laborers who staff the factories and how little they will accept in order to have work. This concentrates power and money in a Bourgeois class that profits from the disunity of workers (Proletarians), who only receive a subsistence wage.





If workers unite in a class struggle against the bourgeois, using riot and strikes as weapons, they will eventually overthrow the bourgeois and replace them as a ruling class. Communists further believe in and lay out a system of reforms to transform into a classless, stateless society, thus distinguishing themselves from various flavors of Socialism, which would be content to have workers remain the ruling class after the revolution.





The Manifesto caused a huge amount of discussion for its support for a forcible overthrow of the existing politics and society....

Ratings and reviews

A note to the narrator: bourgeoisie is pronounced “ bu̇(r)zh-ˌwä-ˈzē. Bourgeois is pronounced ˈbu̇rzh-ˌwä also ˈbu̇zh- or ˈbüzh- or bu̇rzh-ˈwä. Proletariat is pronounced prōləˈterēət. A quick google search before you recorded this would have greatly improved the quality of the recording. As it stands, I couldn’t listen to it. I would think knowing this would be the minimal required effort to qualify to record an audiobook that uses these terms repeatedly.

This was the communist manifesto read all the way through. The narrator mispronounced Bourgeois and Proletariat throughout and rushed the reading so much that you can hear him breathe quickly as if he was in a race to say as many words as possible in a short amount of time. He forgot to edit out a mistake too where he lost his train of speaking and had the take a deep breath. I really wanted to understand this book but I might as well read it. I wish I could get my money back.

I didn't enjoy the audio. The voise (person) was in a hurry, without any proper intonation and it was sounding as if all was one big word.