Hey everybody. It is James Lindsay and you are listening to the new Discourses podcast.

And today, it's high time we read The Communist Manifesto.

Now, obviously, I've been meaning to do this for a long time.

I meant to read the Communist Manifesto to you kind of a long time ago,

several years ago as a podcast or series. This is actually going to be two parts. I'm going to read

the main body of the Communist Manifesto in this part. And in the next part, I'm going to read this

kind of literal Q&A about the goals and aspirations of the Communist Party, which is part of the manifesto

for a second episode. But I was planning to read this to you years ago, and I just didn't think

it was interesting enough. And maybe that's because I didn't really understand it yet.

The hardest part about dealing with Marxist or woke literature in general

is that you don't understand it until you understand it. I think this is part of how it survived

so thoroughly, even within the universities, within academia, within high-level professionals, there's a lot going on.

And if you don't understand the kind of metaphysical underpinnings to the whole project,

you don't understand what you're reading.

You can take it in fact at face value.

You can take it at various different levels of comprehension.

But if you don't understand what's really under the hood, which takes lots of knowing about background things and lots of times reading it to kind of pull apart the way it's written, then you'll make mistakes.

And this is why I think we've been plagued for a hundred and, I guess, this was written in 1848.

And so what, that 170, 175 years, I guess, just doing the math quickly, of plagued with communism in the world.

Now, of course, most of communism wasn't very, there was communism before

the Communist Manifesto, and there wasn't a lot of actual communism as a world phenomenon

until Lenin made it a real world thing by taking over Russia and creating the Soviet Union in 1917. But nevertheless,

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