Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in Brussels in the winter of 1847-48, commissioned by the Communist League as a theoretical and programmatic document. It was published in London in February 1848, just weeks before the revolutionary uprisings that swept through most of Europe that year. The text is approximately forty pages in standard English translation. It opens with the declaration that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," argues that capitalist development has created a working class whose interests are structurally opposed to those of the capitalist class, predicts the eventual collapse of capitalism through its own contradictions, and proposes a series of immediate measures toward the abolition of private property in the means of production.
The theoretical core of the Manifesto is the materialist conception of history: that economic structures, how a society organizes production and distributes what it produces, determine the social, legal, and ideological frameworks that members of that society take to be natural or permanent. The bourgeoisie, in this account, are not villains; they are the agents of an economic revolution whose productive capacity genuinely transformed human material conditions while concentrating ownership of that productive capacity in fewer and fewer hands. The proletariat's eventual political victory is described as the first genuinely universal liberation, because the proletariat, owning nothing, represents no particular economic interest against others.
The Manifesto has been refuted, selectively applied, used to justify things Marx explicitly rejected, and returned to by each generation that finds the contradictions of capitalist development sharper than the previous generation expected them to be. Reading it as a historical document, the specific conditions of 1848 Europe, the specific version of capitalism it analyzes, the specific political predictions it makes, allows one to distinguish what has proven durable from what was specific to its moment. The description of how capital produces globalization, dissolves traditional social bonds, and concentrates wealth while proliferating precarity is more recognizable now than it was to many of the text's twentieth-century readers.
Machiavelli wrote The Prince while under house arrest, hoping the Medici would give him a government job. They never did.
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