The last couple of days I read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. I grew up in Eastern Europe (Poland) so I have a feeling of that world, and family with first-hand experience. And on a recent trip, they told stories about what daily life was like at that time – not good.

My experience is intuitive, coming from having spent summers there and watching family go through it. But I have very little historical or political understanding of communism. The manifesto paints the picture of the start of that.

More interestingly, is how an idea that so many people believed in turned out to be so bad for those same people.

I don't have any more detailed commentary, but I will say I think it's worth a read. It's always useful to have a data point for a situation that looked good at the start and turned out badly.