Industrial Revolution Primary Sources | Karl Marx

Excerpt from The Communist Manifesto

Published in 1848; translation from
German into English by Helen Macfarlane
published in The Red Republican, June–November 1850

"Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class."

Whether you agree with it or detest its message, there is little doubt that The Communist Manifesto is one of the most influential documents produced during the Industrial Revolution. It is the core document of communism, a form of government in which all the people own property, including both land and capital, in common. The tension between communisim and capitalist democracy was at the heart of the forty-five-year-long Cold War (1945–90) between the United States and the Soviet Union (now the Russian Federation). Communism, and the fight against it, was one of the major...