The 10 Most Influential Books of All Time
9. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Communist Manifesto (originally Manifesto of the Communist Party) is an 1848 political pamphlet by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London just as the revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognised as one of the world’s most influential political manuscripts. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism’s potential future forms.
Marx suggests that just as history has seen the evolution of Feudalism into Capitalism, Capitalism will give way to Socialism. This book was published during a time when workers lived in poverty and had terrible working conditions. Although the book had a profound influence on the events of the second half of the 19th and most of the 20th century, the Communist theory propagated by this book proved to be a complete disaster in practice.
