Manifesto of the Communist Party

Manifesto of the Communist Party (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is an 1848 political document by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London just as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognised as one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.

The book is divided into a preamble and four sections, the last of these a short conclusion. The introduction begins by proclaiming: "A spectre is haunting Europethe spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre". Pointing out that parties everywhereincluding those in government and those in the oppositionhave flung the "branding reproach of communism" at each other, the authors infer from this that the powers-that-be acknowledge communism to be a power in itself. Subsequently, the introduction exhorts Communists to openly publish their views and aims, to "meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself".

The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely 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. 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.

(Samuel Moore is best known as the first English translator of Das Kapital and the only authorized tranlation of The Communist Manifesto, which was commissioned, thoroughly verified and supplied with footnotes by Friedrich Engels.)

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