The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition

By Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Eric Hobsbawm

This modern edition of the political call-to-arms whose “influence has been surpassed only by the Bible” highlights Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ prescient insights on capitalism (Guardian).

A Communist Manifesto for the 21st-century reader concerned by the ever-widening wealth gap, the instability of financial markets, and the gradual destruction of the environment

In the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, global capitalism became entrenched in its modern, neoliberal form. Its triumph was so complete that the word “capitalism” itself fell out of use in the absence of credible political alternatives. But with the outbreak of financial crisis and global recession in the twenty-first century, capitalism is once again up for discussion. The status quo can no longer be taken for granted.

As Eric Hobsbawm argues in his acute and elegant introduction to this modern edition, in such times The Communist Manifesto emerges as a work of great prescience and power despite being written over a century and a half ago. He highlights Marx and Engels’s enduring insights into the capitalist system: its devastating impact on all aspects of human existence; its susceptibility to enormous convulsions and crises; and its fundamental weakness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781844679034

Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, historian, political theorist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Born in Prussia, he received his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Jena in Germany and became an ardent follower of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx was already producing political and social philosophic works when he met Friedrich Engels in Paris in 1844. The two became lifelong colleagues and soon collaborated on "The Communist Manifesto," which they published in London in 1848. Expelled from Belgium and Germany, Marx moved to London in 1849 where he continued organizing workers and produced (among other works) the foundational political document Das Kapital. A hugely influential and important political philosopher and social theorist, Marx died stateless in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London.