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  • Published: 25 February 2015
  • ISBN: 9780141397986
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 64
  • RRP: $7.99

The Communist Manifesto

Little Black Classics



The revolutionary summons to workers transformed the modern world and still shapes millions of lives today.

'The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.'
Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes - one of the most important and influential political theories ever formulated.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

  • Published: 25 February 2015
  • ISBN: 9780141397986
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 64
  • RRP: $7.99

Other books in the series

About the authors

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (1820-95) was the son of a Manchester factory owner. He wrote several groundbreaking essays on contemporary social and political conditions in Britain, including The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), in which he criticised the working conditions and treatment of the urban poor. After Karl Marx' death, Engels completed and published the last two volumes of Das Kapital (1884, 1894) from his friend's surviving papers.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Prussia. While attending university in Berlin he was influenced by the ideas of the philosopher Hegel and his critics, the Young Hegelians, but Marx eventually rejected both schools of thought. He quickly earned the reputation of a revolutionary and left Germany for Paris, where he met his lifelong friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Together they wrote and published The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848, just before the first wave of revolutions in France. Marx returned to Germany but his radical activities led to expulsion, whereupon he moved to London. There, Marx and Engels collaborated on further works on economics and contemporary politics. Marx also wrote his major treatise, Das Kapital, but only the first volume was published in his lifetime. Marx died in poverty on March 14, 1883, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.