The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Communist Manifesto
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The opening of Chapter I
In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the middle ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
The excerpt is the third paragraph of Chapter I and the two after it: the ranks of Rome and the middle ages, the argument that bourgeois society has kept class antagonisms and only changed their form, and the claim that society is splitting into two camps.
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Pamphlet
14,000 words
47 min
Standalone
London, 1848, and the Europe of the February and March revolutions
A preface, four chapters and ten groups
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0.62 MB (EPUB) · 0.55 MB (AZW3) · 0.63 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #61 · Standard Ebooks
The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet of four chapters, written in German for the Communist League and printed in London in February 1848, weeks before the revolution in Paris. Its argument is that the history of every society so far has been a history of class struggles, that the bourgeoisie has been the most revolutionary class in that history, and that the system it built now produces the class that will end it. The last chapters turn to programme and to the rival socialisms of the 1840s.
The text moves fast: a preface by Engels from 1888, the short introduction on the specter haunting Europe, then the four chapters. Chapter I gives the rise of the bourgeoisie and the making of the proletariat; Chapter II says what the Communists want; Chapter III takes apart the feudal, petty-bourgeois, German, conservative and utopian socialisms; Chapter IV states the tactics of 1848. The Wikipedia article on the Manifesto follows the reception of the book. — The text is available via Project Gutenberg #61 and Standard Ebooks.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: Summary, Ideas & Arguments
This page gives a summary and analysis of The Communist Manifesto, with the four chapters in reading order and the terms the book made current, bourgeoisie, proletariat, class struggle and ruling ideas, explained as they come up. Karl Marx wrote it with Friedrich Engels for the Communist League, a workingmen’s association that had to work as a secret society before 1848; a congress in London in November 1847 commissioned the programme. The manuscript was German, finished in January 1848, and printed in London weeks before the February revolution. This is the Standard Ebooks text of the 1888 Moore translation, revised by Engels.
Chapter I, Bourgeois and Proletarians, is the longest and the one everybody quotes. It opens with the class-struggle sentence, then follows the bourgeoisie from serfs and chartered towns through the discovery of America and the guilds to steam and modern industry. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing production, so it melts solid relations, draws every country into its market, and creates a world literature along with world trade. Its success produces the crisis, the epidemic of overproduction, and it produces the proletariat. The chapter ends with its own gravediggers.
Chapter II, Proletarians and Communists, answers the question of what the Communists are for. They are not a separate party, only the most advanced and resolute section, and their aim is the proletariat formed into a class and the conquest of political power. What they abolish is bourgeois property, not property in general, since capital is already a social power. The chapter then takes the objections in turn, on freedom, the family, nationality and religion, and closes with ten measures for the most advanced countries and with an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Chapter III, Socialist and Communist Literature, is a survey and a demolition. Feudal Socialism is the literary revenge of the aristocracy after 1830; petty-bourgeois Socialism, with Sismondi at its head, wants the old property relations back; German or True Socialism dresses French ideas in philosophical phrases and serves the philistine; conservative Socialism wants a bourgeoisie without a proletariat; critical-utopian Socialism, the systems of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, is credited with its criticism and dismissed for its sects. Chapter IV names the parties the Communists work with, from the Chartists to the German bourgeoisie.
The pamphlet had a long life, and the preface of 1888 is the best account of it: the Cologne trial of 1852, the International of 1864, Helen Macfarlane’s English translation of 1850, the Russian versions of Bakunin and Vera Zasulitch. Engels quotes the preface of 1872 to say the Manifesto had become a historical document its authors had no right to alter. Its argument is against the liberal case set out at greater length in On Liberty, Mill’s essay on individual freedom, and against the older case for the sovereign in Leviathan; the rest of the Philosophy Classics shelf is free here, and the whole text is at Project Gutenberg #61 and Standard Ebooks.
Historical Context
The Manifesto was written to order. The Communist League was a German workingmen’s association, later international, and before 1848 it was unavoidably a secret society. At a congress in London in November 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete party programme. The manuscript was drawn up in German in January 1848 and sent to a printer in London weeks before the French revolution of 24 February. A French translation followed in Paris before the June insurrection.
What followed was not the revolution the pamphlet expected. The defeat of the Parisian insurrection in June 1848 drove the aspirations of the working class into the background, and the struggle for supremacy went on between sections of the propertied class. The Prussian police broke up the central board of the League at Cologne; the members were tried in October 1852, seven were sentenced to fortress imprisonment, and the League dissolved itself. The Manifesto seemed doomed to oblivion until the International was formed in 1864.
The preface printed here is Engels’s, dated London, 30 January 1888. It gives the publishing history, claims the nucleus of the argument for Marx, and says the translation is Moore’s, the translator of the greater part of Capital, revised by the two of them, with notes added by Engels. Engels records the first English version as Helen Macfarlane’s, in George Julian Harney’s Red Republican in 1850, and a New York translation of 1872 in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.
Key Ideas & Arguments
- Class struggle: The first premise, stated in one sentence at the head of Chapter I: all written history is the history of struggles between oppressor and oppressed, freeman and slave, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman. Each struggle ended in a revolutionary reconstruction of society or in the ruin of both sides. Everything else is built on this.
- The bourgeoisie: The modern capitalists, owners of the means of production and employers of wage labour, as the note says. Chapter I credits them with a revolutionary part: they have destroyed feudal ties, made the world market and the modern state, and cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing production. They also produce their own gravediggers.
- The proletariat: The wage labourers who own no means of production and must sell their labour power to live. Chapter I follows them from scattered sufferers who smash machinery to an organized class that forms trades unions and wins the ten-hours bill, and calls them the only really revolutionary class of the epoch.
- The Communists: The party of the title, though not a party in the ordinary sense. It has no interests apart from the proletariat and sets up no sectarian principles; it differs from other working-class parties only in bringing the common interest of the class forward and in knowing the line of march. Its immediate aim is political power.
- The ten measures: The programme at the end of Chapter II: abolition of property in land and rents to public purposes, a heavy graduated income tax, abolition of inheritance, confiscation of rebel property, a state bank, state transport, state factories, equal liability to labour, the union of agriculture and manufacture, free public education. The text calls them despotic inroads on property, and says they will differ from country to country.
- Ruling ideas: The claim in Chapter II that the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class, so that talk of eternal truths and justice is the will of a class made into law. Consciousness changes with the conditions of material existence, and the argument answers the charge that communism abolishes religion and morality.
Core Arguments & Influence
- History as class struggle: The opening sentence is a programme for the whole book, and the book keeps testing it. Rome, the middle ages and the modern state are lined up as arrangements of rank, and the point is that the modern arrangement is not a departure but a simplification. Two camps face each other, and Chapter I works out what each has done. The claim is not that every quarrel is a class quarrel, but that the quarrels that change a society are.
- The self-undermining of the bourgeois order: The bourgeoisie is praised as the most revolutionary class in history, and the praise is the argument. It has created productive forces greater than all earlier generations together, and the property relations it built cannot hold them: the sorcerer cannot control the powers he has called up, and the crisis returns as an epidemic of overproduction. Every earlier ruling class kept its slaves alive; this one lets its workers sink into pauperism, and produces its own gravediggers.
- Political power as the power of a class: The executive of the modern state is a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie, and political power is the organized power of one class for oppressing another. The conquest of political power is therefore the first business of the workers, and the state is to be used and then left without a function, since a public power loses its political character once classes have gone. Chapter IV applies the same view: wherever a party fights the old order, the question is what class it serves.
- The critique of the rival socialisms: Chapter III exists because in 1847 the word socialism meant something else: it belonged to the utopian sects and to middle-class reformers, while communism belonged to the working-class movement. The test applied to each school is whether it understands the class struggle and the conditions of the time. The feudalists and the petty bourgeois want the wheel turned back, the German true socialists translate French criticism into German philosophy, the conservatives want reform without touching capital, and the utopians reject political action and leave sects behind them.
- A document with a history: The pamphlet was written as a party programme and became a historical document. The preface of 1872, quoted by Engels in 1888, admits that details have aged and that the criticism of socialist literature stops at 1847, while insisting that the general principles hold and that the text has no longer any right to be altered. Engels adds his account of the translations and of the League, and the result is read both as an argument and as a record of the movement that carried it.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Communist Manifesto?
The download is the whole pamphlet: the preface Engels wrote for the 1888 translation, the introduction on the specter, the four chapters and the endnotes. Nothing is cut. The English is Moore’s, revised by Engels, with the notes he added, and the same text sits at Project Gutenberg #61 if you want to compare a passage.
Around the text the page supplies what a pamphlet of this density needs: ten summaries that follow the edition’s divisions, six notes on the ideas the argument turns on, five on its larger claims, and a short account of the League and the revolutions of 1848. The groups are editorial, but the divisions are the edition’s own.
The files come in three formats with the same text and the same chapter breaks. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices handle best. No account is needed, and nothing is locked or watermarked.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text is set from a Project Gutenberg transcription and Internet Archive scans, with the preface, the four chapters and the endnotes in the Moore translation.
- Complete text of the four chapters Every chapter from Bourgeois and Proletarians to Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties, with the preface of 1888, the introduction and the endnotes, nothing abridged.
- Ten groups in the edition’s order Ten summaries following the edition’s divisions, including the four parts of Chapter III, each stopping where its section stops.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the chapter divisions intact and no account needed.
- Mill’s essay on liberty, the liberal case for individual freedom against the claims of the state and of opinion, and the sharpest contrast to the account of power given here. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Hobbes’s argument for an absolute sovereign, two centuries before the Manifesto, and the theory of the state that the fourth chapter sets out to overturn. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The shelf where this edition sits, with the rest of our free philosophy and political theory. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
This edition prints the preface Engels wrote in 1888, the short Introduction, the four chapters and the endnotes. The ten groups below follow those divisions, splitting Chapter I, Chapter II and Chapter III where the argument turns. The labels are editorial; the chapter titles are the edition’s own.
- Preface — Engels on the book and its chapters, London, 1888: Engels tells how the League commissioned the programme in London in November 1847, how the German text reached the printer before the revolution, and how the League was broken by the Cologne trial. He names Marx as the author of its nucleus, quotes the preface of 1872, and introduces the Moore translation.
- Chapter I, part 1 — The rise of the bourgeoisie: From serfs and chartered towns, through the discovery of America and the guilds, to steam and modern industry: the chapter follows the bourgeoisie as the product of revolutions in production. It has torn up feudal ties, made the world market, built the modern state, and cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing its own conditions.
- Chapter I, part 2 — Crisis and the making of the proletariat: The sorcerer cannot control the powers he has called up: overproduction, commercial crises, and a proletariat that is itself a commodity. Machinery strips labour of character, wages fall, and the workers combine in trades unions, win the ten-hours bill and become a class. The chapter closes with the gravediggers.
- Chapter II, part 1 — Communists and private property: The Communists are not a separate party but the most advanced section, and their aim is the proletariat organized as a ruling class. What they abolish is bourgeois property, not property in general, since capital is already a social power. The chapter defends this against the charges about freedom, individuality and culture.
- Chapter II, part 2 — Family, nation and the ten measures: The rest of the objections are answered here, on the family, community of women, nationality and religion, with the argument that the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class. The chapter ends with ten measures, and with an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
- Chapter III, 1A — Feudal Socialism: The aristocracies of France and England, beaten in 1830 and in the reform agitation, took their revenge in pamphlets. Feudal Socialism is half lamentation and half lampoon, written in the interest of a class it cannot defend, and its clerical version is the holy water a priest uses to consecrate the heartburnings of an aristocrat.
- Chapter III, 1B–1C — Petty-bourgeois and German socialism: Sismondi heads the school that judges modern production by the standard of the peasant and the small tradesman, acute in criticism and reactionary in its aims. German or True Socialism takes over French ideas without French conditions, dresses them in philosophical phrases, and serves the philistine against a bourgeoisie that had barely begun to rise.
- Chapter III, 2 — Conservative or bourgeois socialism: A section of the bourgeoisie wants the grievances redressed without the struggle, a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère is the example, and the practical form is administrative reform that leaves capital and labour untouched. Its last word is that the bourgeois is a bourgeois for the benefit of the working class.
- Chapter III, 3 — Critical-utopian socialism: The systems of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen come from founders who saw the class antagonisms but not the conditions for ending them, so they invented plans and rejected political action. Their criticism is valuable; their disciples, holding to the plans, become reactionary sects, and the chapter names the Owenites and the Fourierists.
- Chapter IV — The Communists among the parties: Four pages of tactics: with the Chartists in England, the Social-Democrats in France, the Radicals in Switzerland, the agrarian party in Poland, and the bourgeoisie in Germany when it acts against the old order. Germany is the focus, and the chapter ends with the overthrow of existing conditions and a world to win.
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Part of: Philosophy Classics · 1840s
