# The Communist Manifesto The 1848 pamphlet by [[Karl Marx]] and Friedrich Engels — twenty-three pages, commissioned by the Communist League, published in London in February as the revolutions began — that became the prototype of the modern political manifesto and the text every later one imitates or answers. It is in this vault as a foil: the literal document the right's [[Cultural Marxism]] conspiracy theory invokes and projects onto targets that have nothing to do with it, and the formal model — the enemy named, history narrated as inevitability, a numbered program, a closing call to arms — that the [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]]'s far-right texts copy while inverting the content. ## What it says Four sections. The first is the famous one: all history is class struggle; the bourgeoisie has, in a century, created productive forces greater than all previous generations combined, dissolved every fixed relation ("all that is solid melts into air"), reduced every bond to "callous cash payment," and produced the proletariat that will bury it. The passage is an admiring account of capitalism's revolutionary power — the reason conservatives from Schumpeter onward have quoted it. The second answers objections (abolition of the family, of nationality, of religion — "the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class") and lists the ten-point program: progressive income tax, abolition of inheritance, a national bank, state ownership of transport and communication, free public education, the abolition of child labor. Several are now the policy of every industrial democracy; the rest were the program of no communist state. The third dismisses rival socialisms; the fourth is the closing call — "the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. Working men of all countries, unite!" ## The afterlife The pamphlet had almost no effect in 1848 and became scripture only after the [[Paris Commune]] and the rise of German social democracy; it was the most-printed political text of the twentieth century. For this vault the point is the gap between the document and its use. The Manifesto is a theory of economic class; the [[Cultural Marxism]] theory — the [[Frankfurt School]] as a plot to destroy the West through feminism, multiculturalism and the universities — has no basis in it and reverses its materialism, which is why the label does the work of an accusation rather than a description ([[Marxism]] has the doctrine; [[Communism]] the regimes). The other afterlife is formal: the Manifesto invented the genre in which a small group announces that history is on its side and names the enemy, and [[The Great Replacement (Tarrant Manifesto)]] and the rest of the manifesto shelf are its structural descendants with the classes swapped for races. ## See Also - [[Karl Marx]] · [[Marxism]] · [[Communism]] · [[Cultural Marxism]] · [[Frankfurt School]] - [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]] · [[The Great Replacement (Tarrant Manifesto)]]