Step 2, seize the post office, etc.) or wistful schematics for a society free of want and poverty. If Marx did not deliver soon, “further measures” would be taken.īecause The Communist Manifesto has been so traduced and so feared, many people who haven’t yet read it think Marx’s polemic was either an instruction manual for overthrowing the government (Step 1, raid the police stations. From the Communist League’s committee in London came a bustle of letters: anxious at first, then pleading, then grumpy. The manuscript piled up with phantasms: conjurings, spells, sorcerers, colossal enslaving machines, forged weapons, netherworlds, robes made of cobwebs, and gravediggers. Christmas passed 1848 shuddered into life.

Yet Marx kept it on his desk as he toiled he stuck to its rapid-fire rhythms, its brashness. “Question 1): Are you a Communist?” Answer: “Yes.” Both men agreed it was a poor first draft. Where to start? His close collaborator and friend Friedrich Engels had already prepared a 20-page question-and-answer sheet. Marx died in London in 1883 at the age of 64.At the wintry end of a ravenous year, Karl Marx rode a ferry from London back to his garret in Brussels, charged with a simple task: to pull together a written political program for a few hundred radical émigré workers who had decided to call themselves-openly, in defiance of all Europe’s spooks and cops-Communists. Hegel, Marx wrote in radical newspapers from his young adulthood, and can also be credited with founding the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Despite the negative reputation associated with some of these movements and with Communism in general, Marx’s view of a classless socialist society was a utopian one which did not include the possibility of dictatorship. Marxism-the term that has come to define the philosophical school of thought encompassing Marx’s ideas about society, politics and economics-was the foundation for the socialist movements of the twentieth century, including Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism. His most notable works, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter of which was co-authored by his collaborator Friedrich Engels), have since become two of history’s most important political and economic works.

Described as one of the most influential figures in human history, Karl Marx was a German philosopher and economist who wrote extensively on the benefits of socialism and the flaws of free-market capitalism.

The communist manifesto was written by