The Communist Manifesto — who's who

Marx, twenty-nine in 1848, trained in Hegel, expelled from Paris and Brussels. Engels, twenty-seven, author of The Condition of the Working Class in England. Commissioned by the Communist League in late 1847 to draft a public statement. Marx wrote the final text largely alone in Brussels in January 1848. The pamphlet appeared in February, weeks before Paris rose. Their collaboration would last forty years and produce Das Kapital, extensive journalism, and a vast correspondence.

Owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour, traced from medieval burghers to industrial capitalists. The Manifesto's strangest rhetorical move is the sustained praise of the bourgeoisie in Part 1: they accomplished wonders surpassing Egyptian pyramids, drew barbarian nations into civilisation, rescued millions from the idiocy of rural life. The celebration is the indictment. A class that cannot stop dissolving old relations cannot expect its own to survive.

The modern working class — defined not by poverty but by propertylessness. A class that must sell its capacity to work, concentrated in factories, connected by railways and the press, organised through strikes and combinations almost without willing it. The Manifesto traces their development from isolated workers fighting individual employers to a class constituting itself as a national and then international political force. They have nothing to lose but their chains.

The previous generation's three great socialist visionaries: Henri de Saint-Simon (French aristocrat-turned-prophet of industrial planning), Charles Fourier (designer of the phalanstery), Robert Owen (Welsh mill-owner who built New Lanark). The Manifesto is more respectful here than elsewhere — they produced the most valuable materials for enlightening the working class — but dismisses them as writing before the proletariat had constituted itself as a class, appealing to reason rather than historical struggle.

Section III's gallery of rivals, each dispatched with brisk contempt. Feudal socialists — aristocrats mourning the manor, waving the proletarian beggar's wallet as a banner. Petty-bourgeois socialists, of which Sismondi is the classic, defending the artisan and small peasant against both capital and labour. German "true" socialists who translated French radicalism into philosophical abstraction. Bourgeois socialists — Proudhon and the philanthropists — wanting the benefits of bourgeois society without the class struggle that comes with it.