I have been confused by what Michael Hudson wrote in J is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception about Socialism and Marx in . Marx wrote Das Kapital. Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. I may tackle reading Das Kapital someday to read for myself what it has to say. However, I figured that reading the Manifesto of the Communist Party pamphlet would be a much less daunting task.

At first, I read the 1888 English translation itself. When I read the following section (with emphasis added by me):

The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres”, of establishing “Home Colonies”, or setting up a “Little Icaria”(4) — duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem — and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary [or] conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.

They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.

The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Réformistes.

It struck me how the emboldened section could apply to this manifesto itself. After completing my reading of the manifesto, originally written in 1847, I went back to read the introductions to the various editions from 1872 to 1893. I see that Marx and Engels already did think about applying the emboldened phrase to the manifesto. There is also a lot useful historical information in these introductions.

that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles,

Tribal society was the example of holding land in common ownership that I had not thought of.