Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were commissioned by the Communist League, founded in London in 1847, to write a short programmatic text to guide its movement. *Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei* (Manifesto of the Communist Party) was published in German in London in February 1848 — the very month Europe began to be shaken by the 1848 revolutions.

The text is in four sections, but its fame rests on the rhetorical force of the first two. The opening sentence — 'A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of communism' — is perhaps the best-known opening of political pamphleteering. Part I reads all history through the thesis that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles': master-slave, patrician-plebeian, lord-serf, bourgeois-proletarian. The industrial revolution created a new class (the proletariat) and dissolved all old bonds; 'all that is solid melts into air.'

Part II sets out the communists' position: the abolition of private property, of classes, and the withering away of the state. The Manifesto lists ten demands — graduated income tax, the abolition of inheritance, nationalisation, free public education, the abolition of child labour. Some of these (public education, graduated tax) became standard policy in twentieth-century social democracies; others remained contested.

The Manifesto had limited effect in the short term — the 1848 revolutions failed, the League collapsed. Its influence grew from the 1860s on, after Marx's *Capital* was published. From the 1917 Russian Revolution to the geopolitical map of half the twentieth century — social democracy, socialist states, the Non-Aligned Movement — there is hardly a major political project that has not at some point reckoned with Marx.