WorkKarl Marx

The Communist Manifesto

Commissioned by a league of exiles and written as revolution neared: the pamphlet that reads history as class struggle — and praises capitalism even as it demands its end.

by Karl Marx64 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei
First published: 1848(aged 30)
Original language: German

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Overview

A small band of German exiles calling themselves the Communist League, meeting in London late in 1847, handed Marx a commission: write us a plain statement of what we stand for. He took his time, drew on a draft catechism Engels had prepared, and produced the text in January 1848 — a short pamphlet the League printed in German at a workers' association off Bishopsgate and issued around the twenty-first of February. Days later, revolution broke out in Paris and ran across the continent. The Manifesto tells the history of the world as the history of class struggle, and its most startling pages are not the ones cursing capitalism but the ones praising it: the bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels write, has been the most revolutionary force the world has ever seen, tearing up every old certainty and hauling every nation into a single market — and in doing so it has bred the workers who will end it. The pamphlet closes by calling on those workers of every country to combine. For all that, it barely registered at the time; the risings of 1848 were crushed, and the text drifted into two decades of near-obscurity. What rescued it was Marx's later fame and the movement that grew around the First International; a new German edition in 1872, prefaced by an admission that parts had already dated, began its second life. It has since become one of the most widely printed political documents ever written.

Key concepts

Who are the 'bourgeoisie' and the 'proletariat'?

The two great classes the Manifesto sees modern society splitting into. The bourgeoisie are the owners of capital, the means of production, who employ wage labour; the proletariat are the workers who own nothing but their labour and must sell it to live. The whole pamphlet turns on the antagonism between them, which Marx and Engels expect the proletariat to win.

What does 'the history of class struggle' mean?

It is the Manifesto's opening thesis: that all recorded history is the story of conflict between oppressing and oppressed classes, freeman and slave, lord and serf, and now bourgeois and proletarian. Marx and Engels read every era's politics, laws and ideas as expressions of this underlying struggle over who controls production. Modern society, they argue, has simplified it into two hostile camps.

What is a 'crisis of overproduction'?

A recurring breakdown Marx and Engels see as capitalism's own signature: the system periodically produces more goods than the market can absorb, and factories, credit and trade seize up amid abundance rather than scarcity. Earlier societies feared too little; this one is convulsed by too much. Each crisis is overcome only by destroying productive forces and preparing a wider crisis to come.

What was the Communist League that commissioned it?

A small band of German exiles, meeting in London late in 1847, who asked Marx for a plain statement of what they stood for. He drew on a draft catechism by Engels and produced the text in January 1848. The workers' association printed it in German off Bishopsgate, and it appeared just as revolution broke out across the continent.

What does the Manifesto mean by abolishing private property?

Not personal possessions but bourgeois property, the private ownership of the means of production, the capital that lets one class live off another's labour. Marx and Engels are explicit that the hard-won earnings of a worker are not the target; what they would end is the social power that ownership of factories and capital confers. That distinction answers the era's loudest objection.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Capitalism as Revolutionary Force

What if the system that must be overthrown is also the most transforming power history has known? Readers are asked to marvel at capitalism's reach before being told to end it.

Reading all history as class struggle, Marx and Engels reserve their most startling pages for praise: the bourgeoisie has torn up every old certainty, revolutionised production, and hauled every nation into a single market — and in doing so bred the workers who will end it. Recurrent crisis marks the limit of that expansion. Commissioned by a league of exiles as revolution neared in 1848, the pamphlet closes by calling the workers of all countries to combine, and went on to become one of the most widely printed political texts ever written.

capital
class struggle
capitalism
ideology
proletariat
revolution
historical materialism

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Within this work

passages held: 64
distinct concepts: 135
by passages held, corpus-wide: #216

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: capital with money.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 13 pairings. 46 shared passages in all. 21 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
capital	money	7
capital	interest	6
capital	credit	5
banking	capital	4
capital	liquidity	4
capital	profit	3
credit	interest	3
credit	production	3
interest	profit	3
capital	production	2
credit	liquidity	2
interest	money	2
interest	production	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts)
His earliest sustained work, written at twenty-five before he had read a page of political economy: a reckoning with the German idealism he had been raised inside. Its published introduction announced the proletariat; the manuscript behind it waited eighty years for a reader.
DE
1844 On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)
Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.
DE
1845 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik)
Overwhelmingly Marx's despite the shared title page, and aimed squarely at Bruno Bauer's circle. It sits on the hinge between the Young Hegelian quarrels Marx was leaving and the historical materialism he was about to work out.
DE
1845 Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach)
Eleven notebook jottings, not an argument built for readers but private markers Marx set down in 1845 and Engels rescued in 1888. They register the moment he broke with Feuerbach and put human practice at the centre of his thinking.
DE
1848 The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) you are here DE
1849 Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital)
An early, popular run at the economics Marx would spend the next twenty years perfecting. Engels reissued it in 1891 with the term "labour-power" set where Marx had written "labour" — repairing it with a concept that arrived only later.
DE
1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte)
Marx as historian and political analyst rather than economist or agitator: a close reading of a single French coup, written for a New York émigré paper in 1852. It handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence from the classes beneath it.
DE
1858 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie)
Written a decade before Capital and unknown for almost a century: the notebooks Marx filled to clarify his own thinking, rediscovered only after 1953 and central to the Marx revival that came with the New Left.
DE
1865 Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit)
A pair of lectures rather than a book — Marx answering a fellow member at the General Council of the International in 1865, in English. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898, and it became the shortest way into the economics of Capital.
DE
1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital)
The work of Marx's maturity and the one book of his economics he saw into print. Volume one appeared in 1867; Engels assembled volumes two and three from the unfinished manuscripts after Marx died, in 1885 and 1894.
DE

— or open another of their works