II.

The Communist Manifesto

In 1845 Marx was ordered to leave Paris because of his revolutionary activities. He settled in Brussels and began organizing and directing a network of revolutionary groups, called Communist Correspondence Committees, in a number of European cities. In 1847 these committees were consolidated to form the Communist League, and Marx and Engels were commissioned to formulate a statement of principles. The program they submitted, known throughout the world as the Communist Manifesto, was the first systematic statement of modern socialist doctrine and was written by Marx, partly on the basis of a draft prepared by Engels. Marx contributed the central propositions of the Manifesto, which embody the materialist conception of history, or historical materialism. This theory was later explicitly formulated in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1859).

The Manifesto’s propositions are that in every historical epoch the prevailing economic system by which the necessities of life are produced determines the form of societal organization and the political and intellectual history of the epoch; and that the history of society is a history of struggles between exploiting and exploited, that is, between ruling and oppressed, social classes. From these premises, Marx drew the conclusion in the Manifesto that the capitalist class would be overthrown and that it would be eliminated by a worldwide working-class revolution and replaced by a classless society. The Manifesto influenced all subsequent communist literature and revolutionary thought generally; it has been translated into many languages and published in hundreds of millions of copies.