Well, the Communist Manifesto is a political pamphlet to urge the European workers into unity and action. It is not a deep analysis but rather an inspirational speech, so to speak. :)

That makes sense. The anthology I have doesn't include "Das Kapital" (too long, perhaps?) and after Marx and Engels it has writings by Lenin, Mao, etc which I probably should read for my own edification, at least to try to grasp the justifications that politicians and despots give for their own actions. The chasm between what Marx and Engels intended, and what Lenin et al manifested, is enormous. (Which you well know.)

I could tell when Marx was was putting another theory - or theorist - in their place; or rather I couldn't at first, until I got used to his style (in TCM, which I know was co-written with Engels, but the tone of it's humor and critiques was quite different from Engels on his own - sharp, scathing and sarcastic are the perfect words for it.)

Engel's humor, even in his critiques, is warmer. I not only wanted to read more of Engel's work, I wanted to learn more about Saint-Simon, Owen; but most especially Fourier who I had never heard of before. To me that's one of the marks of good history/criticism, when an author makes me hungry to go deeper and read more. (Admittedly, there are huge gaps in my education/reading: philosophy generally, Hegel, et al; economics, psychology, politics etc that I'm not sure I could ever begin to fill up.)

I was extremely interested in the fact that TCM does at several points address the role of women in bourgeois society re: the hypocrisy of the bourgeois maintaining wives and mistresses for themselves; I had been given the impression reading Shulamith Firestone's "The Dialectic of Sex" in college that he did not.