Political Philosophy

The Communist Manifesto

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Karl Marx

1848

Written with Friedrich Engels and published weeks before the revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, The Communist Manifesto is the most widely read political pamphlet in history. In its opening pages Marx and Engels provide what they take to be the key to all historical change: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. They then trace the rise of the bourgeoisie and the specific contradictions of capitalism — how it creates the proletariat as its own gravedigger — before offering a programmatic account of communist aims. The Manifesto ends with one of the most electrifying calls to action in political literature. Despite its brevity, it contains in compressed form nearly the whole of Marx's social theory: alienation, historical materialism, the critique of ideology, and the claim that philosophy must not merely interpret the world but change it.