Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto
On this day · 21 February 1848
A slim anonymous pamphlet printed in London opened with class struggle and closed with a call to arms that would echo for a century.
On February 21, 1848, a thin pamphlet titled Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei rolled off a printing press in London. Written by Karl Marx with the help of Friedrich Engels and commissioned by the Communist League, it appeared anonymously and, at first, almost unnoticed.
The text was blunt. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” it declared, before predicting that the working class would one day overturn the capitalist order entirely. It ended with the rallying line that would outlive both authors: workers of the world, unite.
Few documents so short have moved so much of the world.
Its timing was uncanny. The day after it appeared, revolution erupted in Paris, the first of a wave that swept Europe in 1848. The Manifesto itself had little immediate effect, but its arguments gathered force across the next century, shaping revolutions, governments, and the political vocabulary of the modern age.
Sources & references
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