Communist Manifesto

5 Pages 1179 Words

The Manifesto of the Communist Party was drafted as its party program by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in Brussels at the order of the second congress of the League of Communists (December 2-8, 1847) and was first published by the order of the central authority of the league in the German language in an anonymous booklet of twenty three printed pages in London at the end of February 1848, just prior to the outbreak of the French February revolution. The Manifesto marked the end of a year-long discussion within the League of the Just about the objectives and methods of proletarian emancipation and implied the conclusion of its transformation into the League of Communists. In Marxist literature this publication, which marked a milestone in the theoretical evolution of Marx and Engels and reflected the crucial principles of their world view in a relatively self-contained and complete form, is held to be the birth certificate of scientific socialism, which was fundamentally distinct from utopian socialism. Brought into its final version by Marx, it undoubtedly was the most brilliant and widely read writing of Marx and Engels; thanks to its down-to-earth analysis of society with its concise and cogent portrayal of a humanizing-liberating perspective for workers and the urgent demands for a revolutionary transformation of society. It was the most effective and most widely read publication of the modern working-class movement.
The Manifesto was subdivided into four sections. Starting from the thesis that past history was a history of class struggles which have always ended either "in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes," the authors in the comprehensive first section outlined the historical genesis of modern capitalist society on the basis of economic processes; they assigned the "most revolutionary part" to the bourgeoisie in its efforts to transform productive forces and soc...