Analytical reviews - Assignment Example

There is a clear agenda to highlight the exploitation of the working classes, called the proletariat, by the ruling classes, called the bourgeoisie. This manifesto is, as its title suggests, a book of political theory but it is also much more than that. The opening line indicates a wider concern with human history on a global scale: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”2 What follows is a theory which covers all societies from the classical Roman times of patricians and slaves, through medieval serfs and lords in a feudal system to Victorian industrialization and the huge enterprise network of colonialism, spanning many countries from Europe to India and America.

The wide scope of the work and its emphasis on human culture places it firmly in the genre of global history, and it displays remarkable insights into economic and political processes which are far ahead of its time. Many of the ideas contained in the treatise, such as economic determinism, have inspired whole generations of politicians, and the authors are credited with molding the foundations for revolution and the creation of Soviet Russian and many other major modern states. The idea that the working classes in any society are bound to rise up and forcibly seize power was naturally seen as a threat by many European commentators, and it provoked both ardent followers and severe critics.

Events in the twentieth century, and now very dramatically in the twenty-first century, have shown that this kind of generic analysis makes perfect sense in describing many specific historical situations. People do tend to rise up against repressive regimes and this manifesto gives them rational arguments and encouragement to do just that. As a complete analysis of human society, however, the manifesto fails to measure up. The world has adopted a largely capitalist methodology, and the predicted rise of the working class has not been universally observed.

In fact there are many examples of how the Marxist working class utopias have turned into a different kind of oppression, where people were trapped in stultifying centrally planned universal poverty. The Communist Manifesto is nevertheless a classic of world literature, homing in on vital issues like labor and its value, forms of government for an industrial age, and the economic inter-connectedness of the modern world, and it is extremely useful as a counterpoint to the currently dominant ideas of capitalism.

Part Two: World-Systems Theory: Capitalism, Development, and Under-Development. The important theoretical study entitled World Systems Analysis: An Introduction by Immanuel Wallerstein is a description of the way that our understanding of many disciplines loosely gathered under the title “social sciences” has changed. Epistemology is a key concern, because any artificial divisions between fields of knowledge can distort the way that we perceive and therefore understand reality. Wallerstein describes how, until the second world war, scholars operated in separate subject areas like history, geography, politics, economics, sociology, etc.

but that by the 1970s the boundaries between these areas had become less fixed. The late twentieth century was marked by