The Communist Manifesto Study Guide

Liberation School
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto as “a complete theoretical and practical party program” for the initially German-based, and then international, Communist League. It was written and published during the heat of revolutionary uprisings in Europe in 1848, and continues to inspire revolutionary struggle across the globe today. We hope this guide, which focuses on key arguments and concepts, will help newcomers and veterans alike take all they can from this crucial theoretical document.

Download The Communist Manifesto-PDF

Preface Frederick Engels 1888

1. How does Engels explain why The Communist Manifesto was written?
2. What is the larger context around which The Communist Manifesto was situated, according to Engels?
3. How did the ebb and flow of the European working-class movement impact the life of The Communist Manifesto?
4. How does Engels explain why the pamphlet used the word Communist and not Socialist?
5. Discuss the contemporary significance of what Engels calls the “fundamental proposition” of the Manifesto that “forms its nucleus.”
6. Why is it significant that Engels brings attention to the “general principles” of the Manifesto being “as correct today as ever,” but that in practice certain aspects are “antiquated”?

Manifesto of the Communist Party

7. The pamphlet begins with the famous passage, “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.” Within this context Marx and Engels argue for the need for a manifesto of the Communist Party. Discuss the resurgence of this specter in the contemporary context. How does this situation render The Communist Manifesto relevant today?

I: Bourgeois and Proletarians

8. How is it significant that Marx and Engels identify class struggle as the primary driving force of historical development?
9. Discuss the significance of the colonization of the Americas in the advent of the modern bourgeoisie and capitalism more generally.
10. The line referring to the “modern state” as the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” has helped us understand why the capitalist class as a whole in the US does not and has never viewed Trump as their representative. Explain and discuss this complex situation.
11. What has been the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie?
12. Why is it extremely significant that the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production and, consequently, the whole relations of society?
13. What do Marx and Engels’ mean by the phrase, “all that is solid melts into air?” Why is this helpful for our understanding of capitalism?
14. Discuss the process through which the bourgeoisie create “a world after its own image.”
15. How does the manufacture of dependency and the resultant centralization of capital also lead to the centralization of political power?
16. If the “means of production and of exchange” at the heart of capitalism “were generated in feudal society,” then how might socialism develop out of currently existing capitalism?
17. Why is it so important to the contemporary communist movement to understand that the bourgeoisie “is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”?
18. Marx and Engels point to a central contradiction of capital: that too much industry can make it seem like all industry had been destroyed. How can we understand this paradox of capitalism? How do capitalists tend to overcome this crisis of “over-production”?
19. Why do capitalists’ corrective measures tend to only create more crisis? What are some contemporary examples of this?
20. Not only do the weapons the bourgeoisie used to fell feudalism get turned back on themselves, but, in the process, they have also created the class that wields those weapons, the proletariat. What is this process and how it is playing out today in the US and in different parts of the world?
21. Discuss the development of the bourgeoisie and the forces of capital acting upon it.
22. How does the development of capitalism tend toward the emergence of only two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?
23. Discuss the development of proletarian consciousness as it relates to the larger development of capitalism.
24. Why do increases in the efficiency of production tend to coincide with decreases in workers’ wages and standard of living?
25. How does the development of capitalism facilitate the organization of the workers?
26. Discuss where the competition between workers stems from and how workers have traditionally overcome it. Why is this an ongoing struggle?
27. What is the larger context in which the bourgeoisie has been compelled to provide the proletariat with the political education that can ultimately be wielded against capital itself?
28. Why do Marx and Engels argue that the proletariat alone is the revolutionary class within the capitalist era?
29. Again, why do the bourgeoisie produce, “above all…its own grave-diggers”?
30. Marx and Engels argue that the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat is “inevitable.” How is inevitability different from being predetermined or deterministic? This is a crucial distinction too often misunderstood.

II: Proletarians and Communists

31. Marx and Engels begin the chapter with an important question: “In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?” How do they answer this question?
32. What is the one characteristic that distinguishes Communists from other working-class parties? How does this factor inform the communist movement today?
33. What is the “immediate aim of the Communists”? How is the movement currently working toward this aim?
34. What is the larger historical nuance behind the conclusion that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property”?
35. What is the significance of the conclusion that wage labor does not create any property for the laborer?
36. Why is capital not a personal but a social power? What is the larger significance of this for the Communist movement?
37. What are the general different uses of labor in capitalism versus communism? Why is this distinction important to make for the practical movement?
38. Explain what Marx and Engels mean when they say that in capitalism “the past dominates the present” and in communism “the present dominates the past.”
39. What is meant by freedom by the bourgeoisie?
40. What response does Marx and Engels offer the assumption that the abolition of private property will cause “universal laziness”?
41. Marx and Engels state that they wish to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. What might this look like in practice? Are teachers unions currently engaged in this struggle?
42. What is the Communist response to the bourgeois charge of wanting to create a “community of women”?
43. What is the Communist response to the bourgeois charge of wanting to abolish countries and nationality?
44. Explain how ones consciousness “changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life.”
45. Discuss this well-known sentence: “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”
46. How is it that “within the old society the elements of a new one have been created”? What does this mean for the practical day-to-day struggle of the communist movement?
47. How and why does Communism abolish “eternal truths”?
48. Discuss the 10 generally-applicable steps that tend to apply to the development of capitalism into Communism. Discuss the global and historical nuance. That is, Marx and Engels are not offering a blueprint, which is impossible because capitalism and the balance of forces are constantly shifting, but a general guide that tends to hold true.

III: Socialist and Communist Literature

Reactionary Socialism

49. (Feudal Socialism): What was the aristocratic purpose of feudalism socialism in combating the rise of the bourgeoisie?
50. (Petty Bourgeois Socialism): How did petty bourgeois socialism function in a similar way to feudal socialism?
51. (German or “True” Socialism): What is the historical context of the emergence of so-called “true” socialism?
52. How did the importation of French socialist literature into Germany result in it losing all of its practical application?
53. Discuss the list of critiques Marx and Engels level against this “true” socialism.

Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism

54. What are the primary desires informing this manifestation of so-called socialism?
55. What contemporary examples of it can we identify?

Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism

56. What are the historical factors that limited this early form of socialist thought?
57. What critique of this socialist literature do Marx and Engels offer?
58. What is the critical element within it identified by Marx and Engels?
59. What is the significance of these writings offered by Marx and Engels?
60. Why do Marx and Engels argue that the disciples of utopian socialists “deaden the class struggle” and aim to “reconcile the class antagonism”?

IV: Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties

61. What is the practical applicability of what Marx and Engels identify as the need for Communists to ally with liberal forces and tendencies but without ceasing, “for a single instant,” instilling “into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat”?
62. Why do you think Marx and Engels end the Manifesto of the Communist Party with an emphasis on the international character of the Communist movement?

The Communist Manifesto: A working-class guide to changing the world

The Communist Manifesto stands among the most well-read books of all time. One hundred sixty years after it was first published, it has been reprinted hundreds of times in most of the world’s languages. It has been praised, slandered, banned and distorted.

Certainly more than any other political pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto has stood the test of time. It is studied in schools, colleges, workplaces, activist study groups and underground discussion groups all over the world.

The reason that the Communist Manifesto remains such an inspiration for revolutionary change is that it is not just the musings of social reformers, philosophers or political wannabes. It is a working class guide for changing the world.

Written in the heat of battle

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote the Manifesto in 1848 when they were 29 and 27 years old, respectively. All of Europe was in turmoil. In France, there was growing dissatisfaction with the “bourgeois king” Louis Philippe. National uprisings against the Austro-Hungarian empire were just under the surface. Opposition to the feudal monarchs ruling the German and Italian states was mounting along with growing demands for national unification.

Much of this discontent came from petty-bourgeois shopkeepers and intellectuals. In France, this class had been instrumental in the 1789 bourgeois revolution but had been sidelined under Louis Philippe. In the rest of continental Europe, they were still politically disenfranchised. These forces were mainly interested in becoming the new ruling class.

Skilled artisans also felt the bite of the newly emerging capitalist social system. Loss of their guilds forced many of them into traveling communities of workers that moved anywhere to find work. The ranks of the former artisans, now workers, spawned many radical activists who believed in the struggle for, as Engels said, “total social change.”

The bourgeoisie was relatively unconcerned with addressing the problems of the new working classes. Workers were forced to labor 13 to 15 hours a day and live in run-down and disease-ridden slums. Their numbers were constantly increasing. They had been pauperized by the economic changes of capitalism around them.

The emergence of the modern working class as a political force was the main element that separated the political climate in the late 1840s from the revolutionary ferments of earlier years.

From the new working class, secretive revolutionary organizations sprung up across Europe. Some were inspired by earlier socialists like Saint-Simon or Fourier. Others were inspired by internationalists like Philippe Buonarroti and Gracchus Babeuf, leaders of the extreme left wing of the French Revolution. Militants like Louis Auguste Blanqui tried to set up insurrectionary groups in France.

One such group, the League of the Just, had participated with Blanqui’s supporters in an uprising in Paris in 1839.1 It was this group, renamed in 1847 as the Communist League, that commissioned the young radicals Marx and Engels in December 1847 to draft a program for the anticipated uprisings. In February 1848, the Communist Manifesto appeared as the fighting program of the Communist League.

The Manifesto appeared on the streets of Paris shortly before the February 1848 uprising in that city. That uprising spread with revolutionary fervor across Europe. This revolutionary wave gave the Manifesto an audience among revolutionary activists, raising Marx’s profile in the working-class movement.

The science of social change

What separated the Communist Manifesto from the dozens of programs and manifestos issued by other revolutionary groups of the day? Why are all those other programs forgotten today but the Manifesto is still widely read? What is it that has given this small pamphlet the ability to captivate Alabama sharecroppers, Russian revolutionaries and Chinese peasants alike?

Marx and Engels incorporated the most advanced political, economic and philosophical thought of the time into scientific socialism: determining the laws by which society changed and then applying those laws to bring about socialism and, in due course, a communist society.

They applied the dialectical method of the German philosopher Georg Hegel to the materialism of the most advanced scientific thinkers. In this way, they were able to identify class struggle as the motive force of history. Based on an economic analysis of capitalist society and the historical development of society’s productive forces, they identified the working class as the only “really revolutionary class,” the class that had the potential not only to liberate itself but all of humanity.

Starting with their often-quoted phrase, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” the two young revolutionaries sketched in a popular way the history of class struggle from its beginning until 1848. In this way, they were able to put the individual struggles of workers in this city or that country into the overall framework of the struggle of exploited against exploiters. It is that context that allows the Manifesto to speak to revolutionaries around the world struggling against capitalism.

Rooted in working-class organization

The historic significance of the Communist Manifesto is not only due to the brilliance of the ideas that Marx and Engels elaborated. They themselves acknowledged that most of the essential ideas in the Manifesto had already been elaborated—although not in a unified way.

The importance of the Manifesto can hardly be overstated. It is not just a pamphlet, but the program of a revolutionary workers’ organization in the ongoing struggle against capitialism. The defeat of the 1848 revolutions led to major reprisals against revolutionaries. The Communist League was disbanded amid the anti-communist trials in Cologne in 1852.2 Undeterred, Marx and Engels continued toward the task outlined in the Manifesto, the “organization of the proletarians into a class and consequently into a political party.”

Marx’s position in the International Workers’ Association (the First International) kept the program of the Manifesto in the minds of working-class revolutionaries, even though the specific demands had changed to meet the new political circumstances. This in turn led to the founding of mass socialist parties in Germany and France, expanding the reach of the Manifesto as the foundational document for many who considered themselves socialists and communists into the first half of the 20th century.

The triumph of the 1917 Russian Revolution opened the era of proletarian revolution. For the first time, the document that had accompanied the working class sectors of the 1848 revolutions showed itself as a guide to victory in the hands of the Bolshevik Party led by V.I. Lenin. In addition to the tremendous inspiration that the October Revolution offered for workers and oppressed people around the world, the new Soviet state was able to print, translate and distribute innumerable copies of the Manifesto to areas where it once had to be printed secretly or in limited press runs.

The text of the Manifesto is more or less unchanged since 1848. Already in 1872, Marx and Engels referred to the Manifesto as a “historical document, which we no longer have any right to alter.”

It is the reality of the class struggle that continues to make the Communist Manifesto a living document in the hands of proletarian revolutionaries. For example, the death of “laissez-faire” free market capitalism required the Communist International under Lenin’s political influence to update the Manifesto’s immortal slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” to “Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!” Imperialism had extended the tentacles of monopoly capital to every corner of the world, meaning that the overthrow of capitalist social relations would come from revolutionary workers and the legions of nationally oppressed people around the world whose development had been brutally strangled by the machinations of trusts and combines.

Now more than ever, with the speed at which capital is being accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, as the already-socialized division of labor is becoming increasingly international, the observations of Marx and Engels provide a way forward. The Manifesto is not just a critique of capitalism or a manual for revolutionary strategy. It is a compelling argument anticipating that the modern working class would not be simply a victim of oppression but act as the new vanguard that would reconstruct society. This achievement in communist propaganda, in turn, became a material factor accelerating the formation of communist and socialist organizations wherever the workers awakened to political life.

To this day, the Manifesto inspires revolutionaries the world over to struggle for the overthrow of the rule of capital. From Venezuela and Colombia and across Latin America, with the red banner still raised high by revolutionary Cuba, from the Philippines to Palestine, from the belly of the beast of U.S. imperialism, the closing words of the Communist Manifesto still ring clear:

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Endnotes

1. Struik, Dirk, “The Birth of the Communist Manifesto,” International Publishers, 1971, p. 52.

2. Cf. Engels, Frederick, “On the History of the Communist League” (1885) in Marx and Engels Selected Works vol. 3, Progress Publishers, 1970, p. 173.