UNC Charlotte Students for a Democratic Society

At Tuesday's meeting, (4/24/07), we established a discussion group, which is to meet this Sunday at Jessica's house. We decided to read the Manifesto of the Communist Party. I agreed to come up with five discussion questions relating to this document. I've actually got ten already. I'm posting them here so the rest of you can think about them for a while in advance.

1. What year was this document first published? What did America look like at that time? What did England, France, and Germany look like?
2. Was there general agreement on what the word socialism meant? What does the word mean to you?
3. Was there already something called communism, or was this document the point of origination for communism?
4. Does the Manifesto have anywhere in it the word dictator or the word dictatorship?
5. What is a class? What classes are there in the society we live in today?
6. How do work, economics, and politics relate to each other?
7. Marx and Engels refer to overproduction. What might they mean by that? What might we call overproduction, underproduction, or appropriate production?
8. At the close of the document's second section, Marx and Engels set forth a list of ten elements of a communist program, while also saying that every national situation will be unique. The first item is "Abolition of property in land". What do you think of abolishing the practice of treating land as property? If you think this idea has merit, what system might be used to decide who does what, where? If land is not property, are items attached to land, such as houses, property? If you develop a garden, and build the fertility of the soil, do you own that plot of land? If you do not own the land around your house, what right do you have to privacy, and how do you enforce that right?
9. Marx and Engels call for "centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly". Is this a good idea? Should the state be the sole source of capital?
10. Marx and Engels call for "equal liability of all to do work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture." What do you think of that? Should people be compelled to work, and if so, how? Should work be organized and governed along military lines? How do you think work, and workplaces, should be governed?