The Communist Manifesto

Introduction

The Communist League, a small society of mostly German émigrés, commissioned Marx and Engels at its London congress in late 1847 to draft a programme. Marx wrote the final text in Brussels, drawing on Engels’ draft “Principles of Communism”. The pamphlet of some twenty pages appeared in German in London in February 1848, just as revolutions broke out across Europe. Its four sections present history as a history of class struggles, credit the bourgeoisie with revolutionising production, set out the communists’ aims and dispute other socialisms; it ends with “Proletarians of all countries, unite!”. From the 1870s it became one of the most widely printed political texts in the world.

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Connections

Builds on

• The Condition of the Working Class in England1845 · Friedrich Engels

Taken up in

• Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History1896 · Antonio Labriola
• The Weapon of Theory1966 · Amílcar Cabral

Criticized in

• The Rebel1951 · Albert Camus
• The Postmodern Condition1979 · Jean-François Lyotard

More works by Karl Marx

• 1844Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
• 1845Theses on Feuerbach
• 1867Capital