The Communist ManifestoKarl Marx

Published in 1848 on the eve of revolution across Europe, the Communist Manifesto is Marx and Engels's compressed statement of historical materialism and its political consequences. The history of all hitherto existing society, they declare, is the history of class struggles. Feudal lord against serf, guild-master against journeyman, and now bourgeois against proletarian: each epoch's dominant class shapes its laws, morality, and culture in its own image, until the contradictions of production burst the old relations apart.

The bourgeoisie receives a remarkable tribute. It has accomplished more than all previous ruling classes combined, revolutionizing production, drawing the whole world into its market, creating wealth on an unprecedented scale. But it has also produced its own gravediggers. The same concentration of labor that makes industrial capitalism possible organizes the proletariat into a class capable of collective action. As competition drives wages toward subsistence and periodic crises shake the system, the working class is driven toward the abolition of private property in the means of production.

The Manifesto closes with a program: abolition of landed property and inheritance, centralization of credit and transport in the state, free public education. It is less a work of philosophy than a call to arms, but behind the rhetoric lies a theory of history that would reshape political thought for the next century and a half.