Communist Manifesto

What It Is

A party programme, commissioned by the Communist League and printed in German in London in February 1848, weeks before revolution broke out across Europe. Marx was twenty-nine and wrote the final text; Engels was twenty-seven and had drafted an earlier version in the form of a catechism, which Marx wisely discarded.

It is not a work of economics. Capital was two decades away. This is a piece of rhetoric with a theory folded into it: history driven by class struggle, capitalism as a revolutionary force remaking every society it touches, and the industrial working class as the agent that will inherit it.

An hour to read. Marx was a trained journalist with a classical education and an ear for a sentence, and the prose moves like a man walking fast.

Why It Matters

Almost nobody read it in 1848. After Marx's death it became the most widely printed political pamphlet ever produced, and by the middle of the twentieth century a third of the world's population lived under governments claiming its authority. Whatever you conclude about those governments, you cannot understand the last hundred and fifty years without knowing what is in these thirty pages.

Its predictions have not aged well, and the honest thing is to say so. Workers did not grow uniformly poorer. The middle class did not vanish. Revolution came to agrarian Russia and China rather than to industrial Britain, exactly where the theory said it would not.

What survives is the description. The passages on what capitalism does — dissolving inherited certainties, breaking down borders, forcing every nation into a single market, converting every human relation into a cash transaction — are the best pages in the book, and they read now less like prophecy than like the morning news. It is a strange experience to open the most famous attack on capitalism and find its finest writing spent on capitalism's power.

Before You Read

An hour, and it is the easiest book on this list to read and the hardest to read calmly.

Bring the 1840s with you. In most of Europe working men had no vote, factory days ran to twelve hours or more, and children worked in mills. Marx is not describing a world with a welfare state and a labour inspectorate. He is describing what was actually outside the window.

Section III surveys the rival socialisms of the 1840s — feudal socialism, German philosophical socialism, and other sects long since extinct — and is period-bound in a way the rest is not. Nearly everyone skims it, and you may. Do read the prefaces: Marx and Engels wrote seven of them between 1872 and 1893, and they are where the authors say, in their own words, which parts had already dated.

Which Translation to Read

• Samuel Moore's 1888 translation, in the Penguin Classics edition edited by Gareth Stedman Jones (2002) — recommended. Moore's is the authorised English text, revised and annotated by Engels himself, and its cadences are the ones the language absorbed. Stedman Jones supplies an introduction of nearly two hundred pages tracing where every idea in the pamphlet came from, and it is the best account of the Manifesto written for a general reader. The cost: the introduction is six times the length of the text, and if all you want is Marx you will feel you have been sold a scholar. View on Amazon →
• Oxford World's Classics, edited by David McLellan. Moore's translation with the errors corrected, a compact and lucid introduction, and good notes. The best cheap reading copy. The cost: the apparatus is thin beside Penguin's.
• The Verso edition (1998), with an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. Fifty pages by a great historian who was himself a lifelong communist, weighing what the pamphlet got right against what it got catastrophically wrong. Nobody is better placed to write it. The cost: almost no annotation.

Take Penguin to understand it, Oxford to read it, Verso for Hobsbawm. Terrell Carver's newer translation in the Cambridge Texts series is sharper in places, but it costs you the phrasing everybody quotes.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Section I twice, and read it aloud. It was written to be spoken.

Resist the urge to argue with it on the first pass. Find out what it actually says; there will be time afterwards, and a great deal of the commentary on both sides is being written by people who never did.

Then read it against its record. That is the only way to read it honestly, and it is the reason it belongs on this list rather than in a footnote to it.