Stunning Spanish Illustrations for The Communist Manifesto

The Marx and Engels classic, brought to new life in black, white, and red.

For a new Spanish edition of The Communist Manifesto, Madrid-based artist Fernando Vicente created a series of striking, chromatically appropriate black-white-and-red illustrations that capture the message and sensibility of the Marx and Engels classic with brilliant conceptual and aesthetic expressiveness:

Positively the most gorgeous graphic design for the Marx and Engels classic since Paul Buckley’s cover for the Penguin Deluxe Edition:

Meanwhile, beloved British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away a month ago today, contextualizes the contemporary relevance of the classic text in his introduction to The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition:

How will the Manifesto strike the reader who comes to it today for the first time? The new reader can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force, of this astonishing pamphlet. It is written, as though in a single creative burst, in lapidary sentences almost naturally transforming themselves into the memorable aphorisms which have become known far beyond the world of political debate: from the opening ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism’ to the final ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.’ Equally uncommon in nineteenth-century German writing: it is written in short, apodictic paragraphs, mainly of one to five lines — in only five cases, out of more than two hundred, of fifteen or more lines. Whatever else it is, The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force. In short, it is impossible to deny its compelling power as literature.

[…]

But then, the Manifesto — and this is not the least of its remarkable qualities — is a document which envisaged failure. It hoped that the outcome of capitalist development would be ‘A revolutionary reconstitution of society at large’ but, as we have already seen, it did not exclude the alternative: ‘common ruin’. Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to answer.

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How to Be a Grouch: A Vintage Sesame Street Guide to Grumpiness

“If you want to be a grouch, it helps to be tired and grumpy, so — get a bad night’s sleep!”

As a lover of vintage children’s books and of all things Sesame Street, I was instantly enamored with How to Be a Grouch (public library), recently unearthed by Burgin Streetman’ — a vintage Sesame Street book and record, in which Oscar the Grouch spills the secrets of the trade with his signature brand of delightful curmudgeonliness, weaving a masterful case of reverse psychology for young readers.

First of all –
If you want to be a grouch,
You’ll have to stop being so
NICE AND CUTE!
Next — learn to frown!

Though my favorite piece of grouchy advice, one empirically proven via years of first-hand experience and attested to by creative minds far worthier than myself, has to be this:

And perhaps it was a certain recent unreasonable proposition regarding PBS funding, but I couldn’t help noticing a certain resemblance:

How to Be a Grouch was originally published in 1976 and re-released in 1981.

↬ Vintage Kids Books My Kid Loves

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A Message for Mankind: Charlie Chaplin’s Iconic Speech, Remixed

“We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.”

From the same remix artist who brought us yesterday’s Alan Watts meditation on the meaningful life comes “A Message for Mankind” — a stirring mashup of Charlie Chaplin’s famous speech from The Great Dictator and scenes of humanity’s most tragic and most hopeful moments in recent history, spanning everything from space exploration to the Occupy protests, with an appropriately epic score by Hans Zimmer.

I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all.

Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say “Do not despair.” The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it’s written “the kingdom of God is within man”, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power.

Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

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