The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto, originally published as the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and published in London in February 1848 amid the wave of European revolutions that year. It sets out the theory of historical materialism, opening with the claim that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," and argues that the industrial-era conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would inevitably end in the working class overthrowing capitalist society. The pamphlet closes with the rallying cry "Workers of the world, unite!," later reworked into one of the best-known slogans of working-class political movements. First published anonymously and in German, it went on to become one of the most influential and most widely read political documents in the world, shaping socialist and communist political movements for the century and a half that followed.