The Communist Manifesto stands tall among all the revolutionary books of all time, and also most widespread. One hundred and seventy-eight years after Communist Manifesto was first published, it has been reprinted hundreds of times in most of the world’s languages, praised, slandered, banned, and distorted. The Communist Manifesto, with its scientific vision and dialectical approach is relevant even today. It is guided by Marx’s famous dictum: “The philosophers so far have interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.”

The Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848. It was a time when all of Europe was in turmoil. In France, there was growing discontent against Louis Philippe, the “king”. National uprisings against the Austro-Hungarian empire were also smouldering under the surface. The demand in German and Italian states for national unification was also growing.

In 1789, the revolutionary forces led by the rising bourgeoisie overthrew the feudal rule. Peasantry and the proletariat joined this anti-feudal bourgeois revolution.

The bourgeois relations of production got a favourable opportunity to emerge and develop, unfolding at the same time the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. The French revolution created conditions for the subsequent development of the proletarian class consciousness and industrial class struggles, clarifying issues of socialism and communism. The emergence of the modern working class as a political force was the main element that separated the political climate in the late 1840s from the revolutionary ferments of earlier years. The new working class came out with secretive revolutionary organizations across Europe. Some were inspired by earlier socialists like Saint-Simon or Fourier. Others were inspired by internationalists like Philippe Buonarroti and Gracchus Babeuf, leaders of the extreme left wing of the French Revolution. Militants like Louis Auguste Blanqui tried to set up insurrectionary groups in France.

One such group, the League of the Just, had participated with Blanqui’s supporters in an uprising in Paris in 1839. It was this group, renamed in 1847 as the Communist League on the insistence of Marx and Engels, that commissioned them in December 1847 to draft a program for the Party. In February 1848, the Communist Manifesto was brought out as the program of the Communist League.

Marx and Engels developed the most advanced political, economic and philosophical thought of the time into scientific socialism: they discovered the laws by which society changed and then applying those laws to bring about socialism and, in due course, a communist society. They developed scientific Communism in contrast to the utopian communism and socialism of the earlier revolutionaries. For the first time the Manifesto discovered a class for social change, the industrial proletariat, better called the working class. And Marx and Engels explained why and how exactly they were revolutionary.

They applied the dialectical method, adopted from the German philosopher Georg Hegel, giving up his idealism, and developed dialectical and historical materialism. They identified class struggle as the motive force of history. Based on an economic analysis of capitalist society and the historical development of society’s productive forces, they identified the working class as the only “really revolutionary class,” that had the potential not only to liberate itself alone, but also the entire humanity.

Starting with their often-quoted phrase, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” the two young revolutionaries set in a popular way the history of class struggle from its beginning until 1848. The historic significance of the Communist Manifesto is not only due to the brilliance of the ideas that Marx and Engels elaborated. For the first time, a strategy of revolution was developed, the program of revolution. Marx and Engels made a scientific analysis of various classes of the existing society, and showed that the working class by its nature was the most revolutionary.

The Manifesto inspired the International Workers’ Association (the First International) and the founding of mass socialist parties in Germany and France, expanding its reach in the 20th century. In some ways, the Russian revolution can be considered a product of the Communist Manifesto, in the hands of the Bolshevik Party led by V.I. Lenin.

Lenin subsequently did at least two things based upon the Manifesto. First, he analysed the higher stage of capitalism as imperialism. And second, he related the modern revolutions to imperialism by broadening their front into democratic alliances. He traced the anti-colonial national freedom struggles or the national liberation revolutions directly to imperialism, and called upon the Communists to actively participate in the bourgeois democratic revolutions. Thus the Manifesto also became a program for the oppressed people fighting against colonialism, and for freedom, ultimately leading to forms of socialism.

Communist Manifesto continues to inspire us even in the 21st century, in the century where a new working class is emerging under the impact of the scientific and technological-information revolution. The context and conditions have changed, the methods of transformation, too, have transformed, but the basic methodology and inspiration remain the same.

The Communist Manifesto teaches us how to change the society step by step in a democratic direction, in alliance with other democratic forces. (IPA Service)