Manifesto of the Communist Party

Drawn up in German in January 1848 for a workingmen's association called the Communist League, this political programme sets out how its authors read the history of Europe. The edition here is the English translation by Samuel Moore, revised by Frederick Engels, who adds a preface and a few explanatory notes dated 1888.

Engels uses that preface to trace what became of the text: the league broken up after the Cologne trial of 1852, the later International Workingmen's Association, and translations into Danish, Polish, Russian, French and Spanish. He also names the central idea he credits to Marx, that the history of mankind is a history of class struggles.

The main text argues about capital, wage labour, property and the middle class, in a direct, debating voice that answers its critics as it goes. Anyone studying nineteenth-century politics, economics or the labour movement will find a primary document here, best read as an argument of its own time.