THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Signet Classics, reprint (1998)
(first published in 1848)

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, 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, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

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, plebians, 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 bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified 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...." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Part 1, Bourgeois and Proletarians, (authorised English translation by Samuel Moore, 1888) quoted on The Australian National University website)

BOOK DESCRIPTION
"...It was in Paris that he [Marx] met and began working with his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels, who called Marx's attention to the situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics. After he was forced to leave Paris for his writings, he and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium.

There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a critique of the philosophy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. Marx next wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, which was commissioned by the Communist League (formerly, the League of the Just), an organization of German émigrés whom Marx had met in London...." (from Wikipedia.com)

ANNOTATION
Written in Engels' stirring prose, and declaring Marx's earth-shaking ideas, The Communist Manisfesto has changed the scope of world politics, and indeed the course of human civilization.

...Few books have had as much of an impact on modern history as The Communist Manifesto. Since it was first published in 1848, it has become the rallying cry for revolutionary movements around the world....

(The following three paragraphs refer to 1998 Verso edition, with introduction by Eric Hobsbawm)

PUBLISHER
"The focus of this modern edition is not primarily the vivid history of Marx and Engels' most important work. Rather, with a characteristically acute introduction by historian Eric Hobsbawm, it asserts the pertinence of the Manifesto today. Hobsbawm writes that 'the world described by Marx and Engels in 1848 in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognizably the world we live in 150 years later'. He identifies the insights which underpin the Manifesto's startling contemporary relevance: the recognition of capitalism as a world system capable of marshalling production on a global scale; its devastating impact on all aspects of human existence, work, the family and the distribution of wealth; and the understanding that, far from being a stable, immutable system, it is, on the contrary, susceptible to enormous convulsions and crisis, and contains the seeds of its own destruction.

SYNOPSIS
For the last 100 or more years, the ideas contained in The Communist Manifesto have played a central role in global politics and economics. Whether you look at it as a relevant historical document or a defunct political platform, this small pamphlet by Marx and Engels is undeniably a crucial document in the formation of the world today....and as eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm points out in the introduction, it is still a powerful document. The Communist Manifesto is a short but dense read. Add to that the weight of history it carries, and it remains a crucial text of the 20th century.

Library Journal
...[Published in 1998] to honor the 150th anniversary of the original publication of Marx and Engels's masterpiece...This edition contains a new introduction by historian Eric Hobsbawn, who insists that the work should be read not only as a great work of literature but that, 150 years later, it still has much to teach us for the next millennium.