Varofakis has a very insightful rereading of the Manifesto, albeit with the advantage of a century and half of subsequent history:
"It would take the collapse of the Soviet Union and the insertion of two billion Chinese and Indian workers into the capitalist labour market for its prediction to be vindicated. Indeed, for capital to globalise fully, the regimes that pledged allegiance to the manifesto had first to be torn asunder. Has history ever procured a more delicious irony?"
" ... society splits between non-working shareholders and non-owner wage-workers. As for the middle class, it is the dinosaur in the room, set for extinction."
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
"Old classes die out and eventually only two remain standing: the class that owns everything and the class that owns nothing"
" The only thing we can be certain of, according to the manifesto, is that unless capital is socialised we are in for dystopic developments"
" they overlooked the kind of dialectic they loved to analyse: how workers’ states would become increasingly totalitarian in their response to capitalist state aggression, and how, in their response to the fear of communism, these capitalist states would grow increasingly civilised."
Liberated from competition with regimes inspired by the manifesto, globalised capitalism is behaving as if it is determined to create a world best explained by the manifesto."
"Liberated from competition with regimes inspired by the manifesto, globalised capitalism is behaving as if it is determined to create a world best explained by the manifesto."
"Capitalism’s problem is that it is irrational. Capital’s success at spreading its reach via accumulation for accumulation’s sake is causing human workers to work like machines for a pittance, while the robots are programmed to produce stuff that the workers can no longer afford and the robots do not need. Capital fails to make rational use of the brilliant machines it engenders, condemning whole generations to deprivation, a decrepit environment, underemployment and zero real leisure from the pursuit of employment and general survival. "
"When asked by journalists who or what is the greatest threat to capitalism today, I defy their expectations by answering: capital! "
"the only way of being a communist is to be a libertarian one."
Varoufakis is always worth reading, here especially so. Read the whole thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/20/yanis-varoufakis-marx-crisis-communist-manifestosidd