Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were German thinkers who met in the 1840s and began a lifelong collaboration. The Manifesto of the Communist Party was written in German late in 1847 for the Communist League, a small organisation of workers and exiles, and published in London early the following year. Its English translation by Samuel Moore, made in 1888 with Engels's supervision, became the standard version for English readers.

The text is both a short history and a programme. It presents the past of society as a story of struggle between classes, argues that the industrial middle class had transformed the world, and predicts that the workers it called into being would eventually overthrow it. It ends with a famous appeal to the workers of all countries. Few political documents have been so widely printed, translated, quoted and argued over, and its influence on movements and governments in the twentieth century was immense.

The recording contains three chapters and runs for about an hour and a half. It is read by a LibriVox volunteer, Jon Ingram. Readers and listeners will find it useful to hear the document as it was written, separate from the many later interpretations and from the regimes that claimed its name. Its vocabulary, its confidence and its rhetoric are all striking, and whatever you think of its conclusions it remains essential for understanding modern political ideas.