Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Communist Manifesto

The Manifesto of the Communist Party, commonly referred to simply as the Communist Manifesto, was published on February 21, 1848, to summarize the political standpoint of the Communist League, a small group of mostly German radicals. The German philosopher Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, another young German critic of the social and political systems that prevailed in Europe at that time. Communist and Socialist were interchangeable terms in 1848, referring to an arrangement in which workers would own and control the places where they worked instead of selling their labor to factory owners (“capitalists”). Eventually, the term Communist became identified with the brand of Socialism that came to be called “Marxism.”

Marxism differs from other varieties of Socialism by attempting to put into historical context the rapid and confusing changes that took place during what is now called the Industrial Revolution. By the early nineteenth century the rise of steam-powered factory production created cheap goods, new wealth, and new varieties of poverty. The factory system did not create social injustice, a state of affairs in which some people live in luxury from the work of other people, but it concentrated misery in unsightly, ill-smelling factory towns. The factory workers were more conspicuous than the more dispersed, similarly wretched agricultural laborers, and their misery could not be dismissed as something that had always been that way. Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto that the new class of factory workers could end the long, ugly history of exploitation; as soon as factory workers caught on to their potential strength, a workers' revolution would abolish the ability of some people to live off the work of other people. A world of decency, fairness, justice, and contentment would arrive.

Marxism's ability to present a Socialist society as not only more equitable than capitalism but indeed achievable, even inevitable, made it the dominant variety of revolutionary thinking in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It affected the thinking of millions; highly modified mutant variations flavored revolutionary regimes, notably in Russia and China, and a major twentieth-century movement—Fascism—emerged as an antidote to it.