Communist Manifesto

By Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the Communist Manifesto was first published in February 1848 and is reportedly the world's most widely read book after the Bible. Marx [Page 369]and Engels had been involved with the left-wing Young Hegelian movement in Berlin but came to reject its view that human freedom could be won by changing people's ideas (including their acceptance of alienating religious doctrines) rather than addressing the material realities underlying them. In the early 1840s, both concluded that human emancipation required the abolition of private property and its replacement by communal ownership of the means of production, and that the working class was the key to the revolutionary transformation of society. In 1844, they began a political collaboration that was to last until Marx's death.

The 1840s were a period of growing political and economic crises in Europe. In response, Marx and Engels established the Communist Correspondence Committee in 1846, which enabled them to forge ties with communists and other radicals in both Europe and the United States. They developed links with some of the left-wing leaders of the Chartists in Britain (the first mass working-class movement, fighting for a charter of democratic reforms) and with the League of the Just, a radical organization of perhaps 200 German workers, many living in Paris and London. The League of the Just organized secretly and had a romantic and conspiratorial view of revolution, in which a dedicated minority would seize power on behalf of the masses, but in London its leading members were influenced by the growth of trade unions and by the Chartists.

In early 1847, Marx and Engels joined the League of the Just, and in June of that year, Engels attended an international congress convened by the league in London, aimed at unifying communists from several countries. At this conference, the association renamed itself the Communist League;reorganized itself on more open, democratic lines;and abandoned its previous abstract slogans concerning justice and equality in favor of the call “Workers of All Countries, Unite!”The June congress produced a communist “confession of faith,”written by Engels as a series of questions and answers, for discussion among the league's members in preparation for a second congress in November. In October, following further debates, Engels wrote an improved version titled “Principles of Communism.”Shortly afterward, he told Marx that because the document needed to bring in a certain amount of history, the catechism (question and answer) form should be abandoned, and it should be retitled the Communist Manifesto.

On November 29, the second Congress of the Communist League began in London. After much debate over 10 days, Marx and Engels fully won the organization to their ideas, and Marx was commissioned to write the league's official program. Marx wrote the Manifesto over the next several weeks in Brussels, where he was living in exile, but he drew heavily on Engels's earlier drafts;thus, both Marx and Engels are rightly credited as authors. The process evidently took longer than expected, because on January 24, Marx received a letter from the league in London complaining about the delay. In mid-February, the Manifesto was finally published in German in London, with the title Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Manifesto of the Communist Party).

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