The Communist Manifesto

Name: The Communist Manifesto
Author: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

History is the history of class struggle, and capitalism's own internal contradictions will produce the conditions for its overthrow by the proletariat it creates.

Read it

How it opens

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

The opening of the work itself, so you can judge the prose rather than our description of it.

Before you start

Assumes: no economics; it is a pamphlet written to be read aloud, and shorter than most articles about it
This translation: Samuel Moore's 1888 translation, made with Engels still alive to check it, which is why this wording is the one everybody quotes.

If this is the wrong level

Too easy? Go hereCapital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume IKarl Marx, 1867Profit under capitalism originates in surplus value extracted from labour rather than in exchange, and the system's own dynamics drive it toward crisis and concentration — a foundational critique still argued over by economists and historians alike.

Filed under Social & Political Philosophy in Philosophy.