The Manifesto's backdrop is the industrialising Europe of the mid-19th century. Britain's Manchester textile mills, the coal basins of the German Ruhr, the silk workshops of Lyon had all produced a new social class: industrial wage labourers. Working conditions were brutal — shifts of up to 14 hours, child labour, cramped slums, cholera epidemics. In 1845 Friedrich Engels published 'The Condition of the Working Class in England', one of the first major sociological documents drawn from direct observation in Manchester. Karl Marx, born in Trier, had studied Hegelian philosophy in Bonn and Berlin; expelled from Germany in 1843 and from Paris in 1845 for radical journalism, he had settled in Brussels. In 1847 the two men met at the London congress of the 'League of the Just', a clandestine network of exiled German artisans; the league renamed itself the 'Communist League' and commissioned them to draft a party programme.

The pamphlet was printed in German at J. E. Burghard's press in London in February 1848 — days before the Paris February Revolution. In four short sections Marx and Engels argued the following. History is the history of class struggles: freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, and now bourgeoisie and proletariat. The bourgeoisie is a revolutionary class — it has destroyed feudalism, created the world market, and developed the productive forces to an unprecedented scale; but it has also produced its own grave-digger, the proletariat. The internal contradictions of capitalism — periodic crises, overproduction, the concentration of capital — drive it eventually to revolution. The workers 'have nothing to lose but their chains' and have 'a world to win'. The Manifesto sets out ten concrete demands: gradual expropriation of private property, a heavy progressive income tax, free public education, the abolition of child factory labour, centralised credit.

At publication the pamphlet had almost no impact. A thousand copies were printed and only a few hundred distributed; it was lost in the chaos of the 1848 Springtime of Peoples. The Communist League disbanded in 1852, Marx went into exile in London and spent fifteen years writing 'Capital' in the reading room of the British Museum — Volume I appeared in 1867. The First International, founded in 1864, turned the Manifesto's foundations into an international workers' movement. The brief Paris Commune of 1871, read as the first 'workers' government', became a watershed in Marxist circles. After 1872 Marx and Engels added new prefaces to successive editions but left the body of the text untouched. By the late 19th century the Manifesto had become the central reference for the European socialist parties — Germany's SPD, France's SFIO, Russia's RSDLP.

The lasting impact came in the 20th century. Vladimir Lenin read the Manifesto as the skeleton of the Marxist revolutionary programme; the October Revolution of 1917, the founding of the Soviet Union, the 1949 Chinese Revolution, and the regimes of mid-20th-century Eastern Europe, Vietnam, Cuba and Angola all formally rested on this text. At its peak, more than a third of the world's population was governed under rules that claimed the Manifesto as inheritance. Criticisms and interpretive splits are equally many-sided: the social-democratic tradition (Bernstein, Kautsky) read Marx as a reformist and rejected revolution; the Leninist-Stalinist tradition added 'party vanguard' and 'socialism in one country'; the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse) developed a cultural-critical line; from the 1970s 'analytical Marxism' (G. A. Cohen) reworked the text on rigorous philosophical grounds. The collapse of the Soviet system in 1989–91 produced the 'end of history' rhetoric, but after the 21st-century financial crises the Manifesto's questions about global capital, inequality and labour — 'where is wealth concentrating, for whom is work done, why do crises recur' — returned to academic and political agendas. It is hard to read the text as a single 'correct' doctrine: the same 23 pages have been inherited in mutually contradictory ways by social democrats, revolutionaries, Stalinists, post-modernists and academics.