In the Library
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, 1848
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 50 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Samuel Moore
- Chapters
- Chapters 5
- Length
- Length 11k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of Communism.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Common Sense
Thomas Paine
Paine lights the same revolutionary fire in the same pamphlet form, but the enemy wears a crown instead of a top hat.
£1.99
Germinal
Émile Zola
Zola takes the Manifesto's class struggle underground, to a mining town where a strike starves the workers while the shareholders far away barely notice.
£1.99
About the book
A spectre is haunting Europe, the pamphlet announces in its first breath, and the line still carries the thrill of something about to happen. What follows is not the screed a reader braces for. Before Marx and Engels indict the bourgeoisie, they praise it, marveling at a class that has torn down every ancient wall, dissolved every fixed relation, profaned everything once held holy, and conjured in a single century more wealth than all the ages before it. The famous verdict, all that is solid melts into air, is delivered almost with wonder. That is the strange power of these fifty pages: they make the world they condemn thrilling to behold, then argue that its own restless engine has built, in the worker, the force that will end it. The prescription has been fought over for nearly two centuries. The portrait of a world that cannot stop dissolving its own ground has been harder to wave away. It closes on a summons that still lifts the hair on your neck: you have nothing to lose but your chains.