The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848
A short, incendiary pamphlet that still shapes how people argue about work, property, class and who owns the future.
1818–1883
The Manifesto was commissioned by a small London German workers' group and published in 1848, the year revolutions broke out across Europe.
Feels like defiance, power and unease.
The one tradition capitalism keeps is breaking every tradition.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848
A short, incendiary pamphlet that still shapes how people argue about work, property, class and who owns the future.
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