The Communist Manifesto by Martin Rowson

The first section of the Manifesto, 'Bourgeois and Proletarians', outlines historical materialism, and states that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles'. Subsequently, the introduction exhorts communists to openly publish their views and aims, which is the very function of the manifesto. The introduction begins: 'A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of communism.' Pointing out that it was widespread for politicians-both those in government and those in the opposition-to label their opponents as communists, the authors infer that those in power acknowledge communism to be a power in itself. The Communist Manifesto is divided into a preamble and four sections. In 2013, The Communist Manifesto was registered to UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme along with Marx's Capital, Volume I. In the last paragraph of the Manifesto, the authors call for a 'forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions', which served as a call for communist revolutions around the world. It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism. The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that, in their own words, 'he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles'.

It presents an analytical approach to class struggle and criticizes capitalism and the capitalist mode of production without attempting to predict communism's potential future forms.

Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents. The Communist Manifesto ( German: Kommunistisches Manifest), originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party ( German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is a political pamphlet written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The Communist Manifesto by Martin Rowson