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The Communist Manifesto a guided tour

1848 · Political philosophy in four parts

A spectre is haunting Europe. Two men — a philosopher and a manufacturer's son — name it, explain it, and dare the ruling classes to tremble. The most-read political document of the modern era opens with a ghost.

The book in brief

The Communist Manifesto is not a treatise. It is an intervention. Commissioned by the Communist League at its London congress in late 1847, it was rushed into print in London in February 1848 — weeks before revolutions broke across Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Milan. The authors are thirty and twenty-eight. They mean to give a name and a programme to a movement that has so far been hounded by police as a rumour. The Manifesto announces, in plain combative prose, what the communists want and why the bourgeois order has already produced its own opposition.

The argument is historical and total. All hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles — freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman. The modern epoch has simplified the antagonism. Two great camps face each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat. The bourgeoisie has played, the authors insist, a most revolutionary part — it has torn down feudal idylls, melted all that is solid into air, and built the productive forces that will outgrow it. The workers it concentrates in factories and cities are its own gravediggers. What follows from that is the programme, the polemic, and the famous summons.

The Communist Manifesto, chapter by chapter

Click through the 5 chapters like a tour. Each card picks up where the last left off — a quick way to read The Communist Manifesto in five minutes. Open any book in depth, or jump straight into the reader.

Preamble1 of 5
Preamble

The spectre named

The Preamble is six paragraphs that do one thing: establish the stakes. A spectre is haunting Europe — communism. Every power, from Pope and Czar to French radicals and German police-spies, has entered a holy alliance to exorcise it. From this Marx and Engels draw two conclusions. First: communism is already acknowledged by all the European powers to be itself a power. Second: it is high time that communists openly publish their views, their aims, their tendencies — and answer the nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself. The Communist League, assembled in London, has commissioned this document, to be published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish, and Danish. Six paragraphs; the argument has already started.

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I. Bourgeois and Proletarians

Bourgeois and Proletarians

Part 1 is the theoretical engine of the Manifesto. It opens with the famous thesis — all history is class struggle — and runs through the modern bourgeoisie's origins: from medieval burghers through colonial merchants to the industrial capitalists of Manchester and Lyons. The bourgeoisie is then celebrated at length as the most revolutionary class in history — a celebration that turns on the reader, because precisely by constantly revolutionising production, the bourgeoisie calls into existence its own opposition. The proletariat is introduced, defined by propertylessness rather than poverty, traced from isolated workers fighting individual employers to a class constituting itself through strikes and unions. The section closes with the famous sentence: the bourgeoisie has produced, above all, its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

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II. Proletarians and Communists

Proletarians and Communists

Part 2 is the longest and most argued section. It opens by clarifying what communists are — not a separate party, but the most advanced section of the working class, those who see the whole picture. Then comes the central claim: the theory of communists can be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property. But what property? Not property in general, not the hard-won earnings of the artisan — that's already being destroyed by industry. Bourgeois private property: capital, which exploits wage-labour and cannot increase except by generating more wage-labour to exploit. From there, Part 2 answers the standard objections in series: abolish individuality? — bourgeois society has already done that to nine-tenths of its members. Abolish the family? — bourgeois marriage is already a system of wives in common. Abolish the fatherland? — the workers have no country. Then the ten-point programme, and the closing vision: the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

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III. Socialist and Communist Literature

The rivals dismissed

Part 3 is pure polemic — a gallery of rival socialisms, each introduced and demolished. Feudal socialism: aristocrats mourning the manor who have turned their criticism against the bourgeoisie not because they care about the workers but because they miss the old exploitation. Petty-bourgeois socialism, of which Sismondi is the classic: a critique from the standpoint of the artisan and small peasant being ground between capital and proletariat — backward-looking, reactionary in its solution even when its diagnosis is correct. German or "true" socialism: which translated French radicalism into philosophical abstractions, drained it of its political content, and handed it to the petty bourgeoisie of the German states. Conservative or bourgeois socialism — Proudhon and the philanthropists — wanting the advantages of bourgeois society without the proletariat that produces them. Finally the critical-utopian socialists: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen — praised for the richness of their critique and dismissed for appealing to reason and benevolence rather than to historical necessity.

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IV. Position of the Communists

The position declared

Part 4 is the shortest section and the most immediate. Where do communists stand in relation to other opposition parties? The answer is given country by country: they support the Chartists in England, the Agrarian Reformers in America, the Radicals in Switzerland, the party that insists on agrarian revolution in Poland. In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie against the absolute monarchy — but never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Germany is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, and the communist revolution will follow it immediately. Everywhere, communists support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order. The final paragraph: the communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. Their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble. Workers of the world, unite.

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Key themes

5 threads that hold the book together. Full analysis →

History as class struggle

The opening claim of Part 1 is the foundation of everything that follows. History is not the procession of great men, nor the unfolding of spirit. It is conflict over the surplus produced by labour, and the modern epoch has stripped it to two camps.

The bourgeoisie as revolutionary destroyer

Part 1 contains the strangest passage in the political literature of the left: a hymn to the bourgeoisie. Celebrated as the most revolutionary class in history before being condemned as a transient one. The praise is the indictment.

The proletariat as gravedigger

The second half of Part 1 introduces the modern working class. Not the poor in general — the wage-labourer whose only property is the capacity to work. Concentrated by industry, connected by railways, constituted into a class almost without willing it.

The abolition of private property

Part 2 opens with the objection every drawing room expected: you would abolish property. The reply is precise, famous, and almost universally misread. It is not property in general. It is bourgeois property — capital.

Internationalism and the closing summons

The closing line is not a slogan added for effect. It is a conclusion drawn from the structure of the argument. If capital is international from the start, the conflict it produces must be international too. Workers of the world, unite.

Key figures

The 0 who matter most. More in the full character guide.

Go deeper

In 5 minutes — or in depth
Chapter-by-chapter
All 5 chapters summarized. The full plot in detail, told fast or told slow.
Analysis
Themes & meaning
Class struggle, bourgeois revolution, proletarian emancipation, private property, internationalism.
Who's who
Two authors, two classes, and the rivals they dismiss.
The actors of a world-historical drama.

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