The book has an active table of contents for readers to access each chapter of the following 1) The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 2) The State and Revolution – V.I. Lenin Marx and Engels presented an analytical approach to the class struggle and the problems of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. The book also contains their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism. However, the book is lack of detailed potential future forms of communism. It was Lenin who took the theories of The Communist Manifest to the next level for delivery and implementation of a truly socialistic country. Lenin wrote The State and Revolution in August and September of 1917 and detailed the Marxist attitude to the state in the book, when he was in hiding from persecution of the Provisional Government. The collected thoughts by Marx and Lenin in the two books had a strong influence on many communist leaders to replicate October Revolution Model through overthrowing a ruling party with an armed revolution. Many of arguments in the collection by Karl Marx and Lenin appear familiar for globalization today. However, As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said “He (Lenin) alone could have found the way back to the causeway... The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth... their next worst his death.” Communist solution of building Soviets to address issues of Capitalism is catastrophic to the world. An estimated 70 million people may have died under the soviet regime. The human cost was enormous. Yet despite all this, Lenin’s Soviets was worshipped by millions as a great model by other countries including North Korea today. History is a mirror for us. Reading the collection written by Marx and Lenin, we can have a second thought on globalization and our future direction. This can help us avoid paying unnecessary human cost we made in the past by socialistic countries including Soviets and China. This is a must-read book to understand the foundational thought of a communist party and the nature of a socialistic country.
Author
Karl Marx, Ph.D. (University of Jena, 1841) was a social scientist who was a key contributor to the development of Communist theory. Marx was born in Trier, a city then in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. His father, born Jewish, converted to Protestantism shortly before Karl's birth in response to a prohibition newly introduced into the Rhineland by the Prussian Kingdom on Jews practicing law. Educated at the Universities of Bonn, Jena, and Berlin, Marx founded the Socialist newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. After being expelled from France at the urging of the Prussian government, which "banished" Marx in absentia, Marx studied economics in Brussels. He and Engels founded the Communist League in 1847 and published the Communist Manifesto. After the failed revolution of 1848 in Germany, in which Marx participated, he eventually wound up in London. Marx worked as foreign correspondent for several U.S. publications. His Das Kapital came out in three volumes (1867, 1885 and 1894). Marx organized the International and helped found the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Although Marx was not religious, Bertrand Russell later remarked, "His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" (Portraits from Memory, 1956). Marx once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist" (according to Engels in a letter to C. Schmidt; see Who's Who in Hell by Warren Allen Smith). D. 1883. Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel's Philosophy of Religion in 1840. Marx was also engaged in writing his doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, which he completed in 1841. It was described as "a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy": the essay was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at the University of Berlin. Marx decided, instead, to submit his thesis to the more liberal University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his PhD in April 1841. As Marx and Bauer were both atheists, in March 1841 they began plans for a journal entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), but it never came to fruition. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history. Marx is typically cited, with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science. More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl\_Marx http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/ http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi... http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/... http://www.historyguide.org/intellect... http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic... http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/... http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
