Western Civilization II / Unit 10 WC2 0934 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading the Communist Manifesto
The idea
The exam quotes the Manifesto of eighteen forty-eight and asks what it claims. Its first section makes three moves, a thesis about history, a claim about the present, and a prophecy, and its last line is a call.
In practice
First, the thesis, in its opening sentence: the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles, freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, oppressor and oppressed. Second, the claim: modern bourgeois society has simplified the antagonisms, splitting more and more into two great hostile camps, bourgeoisie and proletariat, while modern industry establishes the world market. Third, the prophecy, paraphrased: the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers, and its ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of existing conditions. The call, in its own words: the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, they have a world to win, working men of all countries, unite.
Where people slip
Read it as a manifesto, a program written for a party in a revolutionary year, not as Capital's analysis. The exam may ask what Marx meant by class struggle or by bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the answers are in the first two moves; it may also ask what made Marx different from the utopians, and the answer is the third, revolution as necessity rather than persuasion.
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