Manifesto of the Communist Party
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~16,600 words · 79 passages
Cite this work
- APAKarl Marx. (n.d.). Manifesto of the Communist Party. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/manifesto-of-the-communist-party
- MLAKarl Marx. "Manifesto of the Communist Party." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/manifesto-of-the-communist-party.
- ChicagoKarl Marx. Manifesto of the Communist Party. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/manifesto-of-the-communist-party.
What it is about
A spectre is haunting Europe: the diagnosis that all history is class struggle, that capitalism digs its own grave, and the call to a proletariat that 'has nothing to lose but its chains'.
Context and history
Commissioned by the Communist League and published in London in February 1848, weeks before revolutions broke out across half the continent. Marx was twenty-nine; Engels helped him draft it. Barely forty pages, it went unnoticed at the time and became, decades later, one of the most printed political texts in history. Its thunderous prose — few works have an opening and a closing so often quoted — has marked the language of modern politics far beyond its convinced readers.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Published by the New York Labor News Co., 28 City Hall Place PREFACE The "Manifesto" was published as the platform of the "Communist League," a workingmen's association, first exclusively German, later on international, and, under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in London in November, 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare for publication a complete theoretical and practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January, 1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French revolution of February 24. A French translation was brought out in Paris, shortly before the insurrection of June, 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney's "Red Republican," London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been published. The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June, 1848--the first great battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie--drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was again, as it had been before the revolution of February, solely between the different sections of the propertied class; the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of the Middle-class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested, and, after eighteen months' imprisonment, they were tried in October, 1852. This celebrated "Cologne Co