The Communist Manifesto
Alternate titles:
“Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei”; “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
Written by The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
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The Communist Manifesto, German Manifest Der Kommunistischen Partei,
(1848; “Manifesto of the Communist Party”), pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to serve as the platform of the Communist League. It became one of the principal programmatic statements of the European socialist and communist parties in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Manifesto embodied the authors’ materialistic conception of history (“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”), and it surveyed that history from the age of feudalism down to 19th-century capitalism, which was destined, they declared, to be overthrown and replaced by a workers’ ... (100 of 181 words)