Political Book: The Communist Manifesto

Origins and Purpose
Commissioned by the clandestine Communist League and published in 1848 amid Europe’s revolutionary ferment, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ manifesto sets out to clarify the communists’ aims, explain the material basis of class conflict, and outline a program for proletarian emancipation. It opens with the electrifying line, "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism", framing the text as both diagnosis and call to action.

Historical Materialism and the Bourgeois Revolution
The manifesto’s central premise is that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". Successive social orders, ancient, feudal, and modern, are defined by antagonistic classes contending over the organization of production. The modern bourgeoisie, arising from the dissolution of feudal relations and propelled by global commerce and industry, is credited with a profoundly revolutionary role. By creating the world market, concentrating production, and sweeping away local and traditional ties, the bourgeoisie reorganizes the planet in its own image. Yet this dynamism is double-edged: the same forces that built bourgeois power generate the conditions for its overthrow.

Proletariat, Capitalism, and Crisis
Capitalism creates a class of wage laborers, the proletariat, who possess no means of production and must sell their labor power. Competition compels capitalists to continually revolutionize technology and organization, enlarging factories, simplifying tasks, and drawing women and children into the labor force. This process both concentrates workers and disciplines them into collective actors. Periodic crises, epidemics of overproduction, expose capitalism’s contradictions, destroying wealth and livelihoods because goods cannot be sold profitably, not because needs are met. As labor is made interchangeable and subjugated to machines, workers’ communal interests clarify. Through strikes and political association, a class "in itself" becomes a class "for itself", capable of contesting bourgeois rule.

What Communists Advocate
Communists are portrayed as the most resolute sector of the working movement, articulating its general interests across national lines. Their ultimate aim is to abolish bourgeois property, capital that commands others’ labor, not personal possessions. They rebut charges that communism would abolish individuality, culture, or the family, arguing instead that capitalism already corrodes these realms under the rule of profit. The path envisioned is political: the proletariat "organized as the ruling class" uses state power to centralize key means of production, democratize economic life, and suppress counterrevolution while expanding the conditions for universal association. Transitional measures proposed include progressive taxation, abolition of inheritance rights, nationalization of credit and transport, extension of common land ownership, free public education, and the abolition of child labor. The horizon is a classless society in which social power ceases to be political coercion and "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all".

Critique of Other Socialisms
Marx and Engels survey rival doctrines, feudal and petty-bourgeois nostalgias, German "true" socialism, conservative or bourgeois socialism, and utopian schemes. They fault them for moralizing without grasping material class dynamics, for wishing away capitalism’s horrors while preserving its foundations, or for relying on benevolent planning rather than mass proletarian action.

Internationalism and Strategy
The manifesto ends by situating communists within contemporary struggles. They ally with democratic forces against absolutism and feudal remnants, yet maintain independent organization and a distinct class program. The conclusion fuses theory with agitation, insisting that workers’ emancipation requires transnational solidarity: "Workers of all countries, unite!"