The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he believed socialism would, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism. This would emerge after a transitional period called the "dictatorship of the proletariat": a period sometimes referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy". In section one of The Communist Manifesto Marx describes feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical process: We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged...the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring order into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socio-economic change.

"The Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx sits atop a larger body of work which forms Marx's philosophy. Beyond the manifesto, Marx has been extremely influential in the areas of philosophy, psychology, ethics, aesthetics as well as the more obvious areas such as political economy. "The Communist Manifesto" is a consequence, then, of a much more complex philosophical analysis of his times. Readers continue to be amazed at how clearly Marx wrote and what an effective piece of propaganda "The Communist Manifesto" was and still is. Reading through Marx's ideas, it is fascinating to know that some of the major platforms he promoted included the abolition of child labor, the creation of a progressive income tax, and free education. The modern notion of Communism stems more from Stalin and Lenin than Marx, who wrote at a time when the only democratic country in Europe was France. England, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire all had limited franchises and Russia was an autocracy. One of the major reforms Karl Marx battled for was the introduction of democracy. It was his belief that the implementation of his program would flow from that. Communism as a modern political phenomena dates from 1917 when splinter Social Democrats followed Russia's lead and developed small conspiratorial parties who were committed to the seizure of power by force. Stalinism is an offshoot of this system and is a form of state terror aimed at ensuring the survival of unpopular anti democratic regimes. Reading through "The Communist Manifesto," one can see a system which was not only an effective for mobilizing political movements, but came to influence intellectual debate for the next century.