The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto (German: Kommunistisches Manifest), originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is a political pamphlet written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848, the Manifesto remains one of the world’s most influential political documents.[citation needed] It presents an analytical approach to class struggle and criticizes capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, without attempting to predict communism’s potential future forms.

The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels’ theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that, in their own words, “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism. In the last paragraph of the Manifesto, the authors call for a “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”, which served as a call for communist revolutions around the world.