Communist Manifesto (Revised)

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Communist Manifesto (Revised)

$10.99

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The Pamphlet That Remade the World

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in late 1847 and early 1848, commissioned by the Communist League, a small organization of German exiles in London. It was published in February 1848, just as revolutions were breaking out across Europe. The timing was accidental. The influence was not.

What the Book Contains

The Manifesto is organized into four short sections. The first presents history as a series of class struggles, culminating in the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The second outlines the communist program: abolition of private property, centralization of credit and transport, free public education, progressive income tax. The third surveys competing socialist movements and explains why Marx considers them inadequate. The fourth, barely a page long, calls for revolution.

The prose is what makes the document last. Marx writes with a rhetorical force that most political theorists cannot match. "A spectre is haunting Europe." "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains." These sentences have outlived the governments they inspired.

Why This Edition

The Penguin Classics Revised edition includes the prefaces that Marx and Engels added to successive editions over several decades. These prefaces are often more revealing than the manifesto itself, showing how the authors revised their expectations as history failed to cooperate with their predictions.