Introduction

Summary

It is now 150 years since the first publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (or Manifesto as it will be known in the rest of this book). The idea of a volume of readings looking at major aspects of the work and its subsequent influence has attracted a great deal of interest: the Manifesto continues to mean a lot to very many people. The reason for this is not hard to find: it is a short work, clearly and dramatically written, which introduces the major revolutionary ideas of Marxism in a popular style. As the clearest short introduction to Marx and Engels's ideas it is usually considered the best of their writings with which to begin a study of Marxism. In this introduction I explain briefly the origins of the Manifesto, summarise its contents and then introduce the other chapters of this book, all of which expand on aspects of the text.

ORIGINS OF THE MANIFESTO

Marx and Engels started to collaborate together regularly from the summer of 1844 when they met in Paris. Paris was at that time a major centre for revolutionaries, including both a variety of French socialists and exiles from elsewhere, notably German artisans, and Marx and Engels mixed regularly in this milieu. Both men by this stage thought of themselves as communists, but the exact meaning of this developed over the next few years. Both had been influenced by left Hegelianism, the doctrine that reason was about to realise itself through world history. Both had also been influenced by a critique of Hegelianism from a crude materialist standpoint by Ludwig Feuerbach, although to exactly what extent and when is much disputed. Engels had spent some time in England, helping to manage his family's cotton-spinning business and accumulating materials on the English working class and the Chartist movement. Both had started familiarising themselves with political economy, and Marx had been reading the works of French historians extensively. At the time they started their collaboration Engels appears to have had ideas closer to those which appear in the Manifesto, despite his lifelong role as junior partner to Marx.