Subj : COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
To   : ALL
From : JOHN FITZGERALD
Date : Fri Jul 01 2005 07:06 am

-


  Here's are some interesting passages taken from the Communist Manifesto,
written by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels in 1847.

   Note:  'The proletariat' means working class.  

   Also, the word 'religion' occurs four times in this  40 page document, 
the excerpts of which I posted below.         -JF.


                    -------------------------


....

 The "dangerous class", [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that
passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old
society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a
proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it 
far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. 

 In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are
already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his
relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with
the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern
subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as
in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law,
morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind
which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. 

....
    When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the
18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death
battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious
liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of
free competition within the domain of knowledge.

....

    "There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc.,
that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes
eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of
constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to
all past historical experience."

....




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                            Source:

  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/



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