The Communist Manifesto 1/2

At the stroke of a computer key, huge sums of money are moved around the world. Factories are shut down in Britain while investment is directed overseas, where wages are lower and conditions worse. Workers are told that they risk pricing themselves out of jobs. Hard-won gains are sacrificed so that companies can remain ‘profitable’ in the ‘global marketplace’.
Yet the quotation above is not recent. It comes from a small pamphlet by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels which was largely ignored at the time of its publication in 1848 but which went on to inspire millions. Today the Manifesto of the Communist Party is still as vibrant and incisive as the day when it was written. Even commentators in the capitalist press have occasionally been forced to recognise its continued significance.
With their opening sentence, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism’, Marx and Engels proclaimed the onset of the revolutionary struggle for a different form of society - one in which human need replaces private greed, where the exploitation of one individual by another is abolished and where ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.
This Morning Star organised event was recorded in September 2018 in Clydebank Town Hall, Scotland. The chair was Unite rep Margaret Wood, and the speaker Jim Whyte, retired Trade Union Studies lecturer. #politics #socialism #marx
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