Commissioned by the Communist League, the 23-page pamphlet opened with the declaration that 'a spectre is haunting Europe' and called for workers of all countries to unite. Written in dense, urgent prose, it appeared just days before revolutions erupted across the continent, though it had little direct influence on those uprisings at the time.
Marx and Engels wrote the pamphlet in a rush over January and early February 1848, with the Communist League's leadership growing impatient with Marx's delays and threatening to find another author. Engels had drafted an earlier version as a catechism of questions and answers, but Marx scrapped that format for something more like a political thunderclap, a manifesto meant to be read aloud and remembered.
It was printed anonymously in German in a small London print shop, its authors unnamed on the title page, and few people noticed it at first. Ironically, the revolutions that swept France, Germany, Austria, and Hungary just weeks later were driven largely by liberal nationalist and constitutional demands, not proletarian class consciousness, and the Manifesto had essentially no role in sparking them.
Its real influence came decades later, as it was translated into dozens of languages and became the foundational text for socialist and communist movements worldwide, invoked by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and by revolutionary movements from China to Cuba. Its closing line, urging workers to unite because they 'have nothing to lose but their chains,' became one of the most quoted sentences in political history.
Key people: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels