The Communist Manifesto (A to Z Classics)
By Karl Marx
()
About this ebook
Contains Active Table of Contents (HTML)
Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), often referred to as The Communist Manifesto, was first published on February 21, 1848, and is one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League and written by communist theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it laid out the League's purposes and program. The Manifesto suggested a course of action for a proletarian (working class) revolution to overthrow the bourgeois social order and to eventually bring about a classless and stateless society, and the abolition of private property.
Karl Marx
Described as one of the most influential figures in human history, Karl Marx was a German philosopher and economist who wrote extensively on the benefits of socialism and the flaws of free-market capitalism. His most notable works, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter of which was co-authored by his collaborator Friedrich Engels), have since become two of history’s most important political and economic works. Marxism—the term that has come to define the philosophical school of thought encompassing Marx’s ideas about society, politics and economics—was the foundation for the socialist movements of the twentieth century, including Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism. Despite the negative reputation associated with some of these movements and with Communism in general, Marx’s view of a classless socialist society was a utopian one which did not include the possibility of dictatorship. Greatly influenced by the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, Marx wrote in radical newspapers from his young adulthood, and can also be credited with founding the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Marx died in London in 1883 at the age of 64.
Read more from Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto: Original Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A World Without Jews Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5What is Marxism? Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Capital: All 3 Volumes - Complete Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Existential Literature Collection Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wage labour and Capital Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Critique of the Gotha Program Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Complete Works PergamonMedia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Revolutionary Philosophy of Marxism. Selected Writings on Dialectical Materialism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Enlightenment Collection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCapital: Volumes One and Two Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Classics of Marxism: Volume Two Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to The Communist Manifesto (A to Z Classics)
Related ebooks
Twelfth Night Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Different White People: Radical Activism for Aboriginal Rights 1946-1972 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarching with April Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Beautiful and Damned Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHard Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrankenstein Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Inner Immigrant Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5From Eton to Ypres: The Letters and Diaries of Lt Col Wilfrid Abel Smith, Grenadier Guards, 1914-15 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Secret War Against Red Russia: The Daring Exploits of Paul Dukes and Augustus Agar VC During the Russian Civil War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHelbeck of Bannisdale Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Works Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Around the World in Seventy-Two Days Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThis Side of Paradise Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBelinda Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5American Women in World War I: They Also Served Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Man's Land Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRichard III Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Private Angelo Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5From Double Eagle To Red Flag Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThings that just make sense in a bomb shelter Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Prisoner in the Caucasus Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dream of Ding Village Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5H. G. Wells Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsScattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twelfth Night Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCymbeline Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTen Years Hard Labour Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Joe Orton's "What the Butler Saw" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Alia’s Adventures: Alia Moves to New York City Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Literary Fiction For You
The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Who Have Never Known Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden (Original Classic Edition) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If We Were Villains: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Annihilation: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is How It Always Is: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Queen's Gambit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tender Is the Flesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Woman in the Room: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Communist Manifesto (A to Z Classics)
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Communist Manifesto (A to Z Classics) - Karl Marx
Party
Karl Marx
(Translator: Samuel Moore)
Published: 1848
Categorie(s): Non-Fiction, Social science, Political science
Introduction
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 Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
Chapter 1
Bourgeois and Proletarians
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — bourgeoisie and proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable third estate
of the monarchy (as in France); afterward, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general — the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors
, and has left