Communist Manifesto Essay Examples

21 February 1848

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The Communist Manifesto embodies the authors’ materialistic conception of history (“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”), and it surveys that history from the age of feudalism down to 19th-century capitalism, which was destined, they declared, to be overthrown and replaced by a workers’ society. The communists, the vanguard of the working class, constituted the section of society that would accomplish the “abolition of private property” and “raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class.”