The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto, originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) is a short 1848 book written by the German Marxist political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world’s most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League’s purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism’s potential future forms.
The book contains Marx and Engels’ Marxist theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, ‘The 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, and then eventually communism.
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Karl Marx, Ph.D. (University of Jena, 1841) was a social scientist who was a key contributor to the development of Communist theory.
Marx was born in Trier, a city then in the Kingdom of Prussia’s Province of the Lower Rhine. His father, born Jewish, converted to Protestantism shortly before Karl’s birth in response to a prohibition newly introduced into the Rhineland by the Prussian Kingdom on Jews practicing law. Educated at the Universities of Bonn, Jena, and Berlin, Marx founded the Socialist newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. After being expelled from France at the urging of the Prussian government, which ‘banished’ Marx in absentia, Marx studied economics in Brussels. He and Engels founded the Communist League in 1847 and published the Communist Manifesto. After the failed revolution of 1848 in Germany, in which Marx participated, he eventually wound up in London. Marx worked as foreign correspondent for several U.S. publications. His Das Kapital came out in three volumes (1867, 1885 and 1894). Marx organized the International and helped found the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Although Marx was not religious, Bertrand Russell later remarked, ‘His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology’ (Portraits from Memory, 1956). Marx once quipped, ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist’ (according to Engels in a letter to C. Schmidt; see Who’s Who in Hell by Warren Allen Smith). D. 1883.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion in 1840. Marx was also engaged in writing his doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, which he completed in 1841. It was described as ‘a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy’: the essay was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at the University of Berlin. Marx decided, instead, to submit his thesis to the more liberal University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his Ph D in April 1841. As Marx and Bauer were both atheists, in March 1841 they began plans for a journal entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), but it never came to fruition.
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