The Communist Manifesto and the parent-child relation

April 2024 Forums General discussion The Communist Manifesto and the parent-child relation

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  • #85621
    Sympo
    Participant

    Read through parts of the communist manifesto a few days ago and found this in chapter 2:

    "Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty."

    What do they mean exactly? In what way are children exploited by parents?

    #128736
    alanjjohnstone
    Keymaster

    If i recollect, the restrictions on child labour were often opposed most vehemently by the children's parents as it  lowered the family income. Maybe that is what is meant.Today, we have secularists opposing the parent's rights to impose religious ideas upon their children, depriving them of being able to make an informed choice on their beliefs.

    #128737
    Sympo
    Participant

    It's an odd paragraph because it's the only part of the manifesto where the parental exploitation of children is mentioned.If you're right about what is meant with this quote, I'm not sure I agree with their idea that parents are economically exploiting their kids by forcing them to work. Then again, I haven't really thought much about it.

    #128738
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    The Communist Manifesto must be read and studied within its context and the time that it was written. I would not even call it a Communist Manifest when it has many reformists and state capitalist meassures. The leftwingers and the Leninists continue applying the measures of the Communist Manifest as socialist-communist rules.  They are still living in the XVIII and XIX CenturyIn the capitalist society we define slavery and poverty as the selling of our own labor force for an economical compensation in order to be able to survive, and there are many children that are forced to sell their labor force in order to support their own family including their parents, the economical exploitation is not excercised by their parents, but by the capitalst classChild slavery in our times is larger, and more  world wide spread than during the times that  the CM  was written, in the USA a country that is always bullshitting about democracy and hunan rights has a large practice of child slavery, many US corporation continue practicing child slavery in South and Central America and they are doing many  dangerous job such as the cutting of sugar cane using machetes and mochas.Child slavery and trafficking is a business that produces more than 32 billions in profits every year, and only a few organizations  iarecomplaining about it, and most of the so called moralists center do not say anything about this type of slavery, they would be forced to criticize and question the same economical system that they suppo The Jehovah Witness impose in all the members of the family the rules  to become members of the church, and parents are encourage to do that, and they go with the children to the street against their own will, and they have their own internal courts to impose family customs on the parents.

    #128739
    Sympo
    Participant
    Marcos wrote:

    Do you think Marx and Engels were socialists during the writing of the manifesto, or did they confuse state capitalism with socialism?

    #128740
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    Sympo wrote:
    Do you think Marx and Engels were socialists during the writing of the manifesto, or did they confuse state capitalism with socialism?
    Quote:
    [The Communist Manifesto] was originally published in German in 1848 and its title was Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Manifesto of the Communist Party). The Manifesto was issued in the name of the Communist League, a loose grouping of German refugees in London, and no author was credited.[…]At the end of its second section the Manifesto lists ten measures which ‘will, of course, be different in different countries’. And when the Manifesto was reprinted in 1872, Marx and Engels stated in the Preface that ‘no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section 2. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today.’ Germany had become a unified bourgeois state the year before. In fact, some of the measures at the end of Section 2 have since been implemented within clearly capitalist and state capitalist regimes.

    Communist Measures?

    #128741
    ALB
    Keymaster
    Sympo wrote:
    Do you think Marx and Engels were socialists during the writing of the manifesto, or did they confuse state capitalism with socialism?

    Yes they were socialists by then (and had been for 3 or 4 years), no question about that, but they drafted the Communist Manifesto at a time when the material conditions for a world socialist society had not yet completely evolved. So they were prepared to support measures that they thought would hasten this evolution. The material conditions for socialism now exist and have done for a hundred years or more, so the measures they supported to hasten this are not relevant and of historical or academic interest only.

    #128742
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/communist-manifesto-and-last-100-years.   This pamphlet will clarify many questions asked about the Communist Manifest

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