Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto

Date

21 February 1848

Category

Religion & ideology

Region

Europe (published in London)

Era

Modern

Significance

In late February 1848, around the 21st, a slim pamphlet titled the Manifesto of the Communist Party appeared in London, printed in German and commissioned by the Communist League.

Written by Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels, it opened by declaring that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles' and argued that industrial capitalism had split society into a propertied bourgeoisie and a dispossessed proletariat whose conflict would culminate in revolution and a classless society. The Manifesto appeared just as revolutions erupted across Europe in 1848, though it had little immediate influence on those upheavals. Its significance grew over the following decades as socialist and labour movements expanded, and by the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries it had become one of the most widely circulated and politically consequential texts in the world. Translated into scores of languages, it shaped the ideologies of mass socialist and communist parties, trade unions and revolutionary movements across Europe, Asia, Latin America and beyond. Whatever one's verdict on its programme, the Manifesto stands among the foundational documents of modern political thought and a touchstone for debates over capitalism, class and the organisation of society.

Empires active in 21 February 1848

• Russian Empire
  1721 CE – 1917 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related religion & ideology events

• Founding of the Baha'i Faith
  April 21 - May 2, 1863 (Declaration of Ridvan)
• Abolition of the Kapu System in Hawaii (ʻAi Noa)
  October 1819
• The Azusa Street Revival and the Birth of Pentecostalism
  1906–1909
• Founding of the Tablighi Jamaat
  c. 1926
• Founding of the Muslim Brotherhood
  March 1928
• Wahhab–Saud Pact Founds the Wahhabi Movement and First Saudi State
  1744

Further reading

A Little History of Religion

The wider story

A Little History of Religion

Richard Holloway

Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.

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