Manifesto of the Communist Party

'Manifesto of the Communist Party' is an 1848 political document by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London just as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, it was later recognized as one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms. 'Manifesto of the Communist Party' summarizes Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics and briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism. In its last paragraph, the authors call for a 'forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions', which served as a call for communist revolutions around the world.

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, 'Manifesto of the Communist Party', and the three-volume 'Das Kapital'. His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.