A Spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism…
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended in a revolutionary transformation of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
No other nineteenth-century text has been translated, discussed and quoted more often, or has had more influence globally, than The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, first published in London as Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei in February 1848. The first English translation by Helen MacFarlane in 1850 was...
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Citation: Crehan, Stewart. "Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 February 2006; last revised 24 August 2007. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3748, accessed 14 December 2025.]
