Introduction
The first text presented here is The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a public statement of the principles and programme of the Communist League.
The Communist League was founded in June 1847, at a congress in London. It was formed as the result of a merger between the League of the Just, a secret society of German workers based in a number of European countries, and the Communist Correspondence Committee, which had been founded by Marx and Engels in Brussels.
Engels attended the League’s first congress as a delegate, and was instrumental in drawing up the statutes of the organisation, which declared:
The aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old, bourgeois society based on class antagonisms and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property.
The League held a second congress in London in November – December 1847, which was attended by both Marx and Engels. Following a lengthy discussion on the principles of the League they were commissioned by the congress to draft a manifesto, The Communist Manifesto, which was eventually published in February 1848.
One may wonder what relevance does a text written around 180 years ago have for the new generations. And yet, if you read it, you will find that it accurately describes the world as it is today. One quote from Chapter One serves to demonstrate the relevance of this text for the situation we are facing in the present epoch:
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, 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. […] It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction.
The text goes on to explain that it is the very development of the productive forces in the hands of the private owners, the capitalists, that in turn undermine the system itself and “bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society”. This opens up periods of crises:
And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The outbreak of the First World War was the first sign that capitalism had reached a breaking point. The world market could not accommodate all the powers and the only way out for the capitalists was to go to war. The deep slump of the 1930s was a further confirmation of everything Marx and Engels had explained back in 1848.
The solution to that crisis was the unprecedented death and destruction of the Second World War. When the laws that govern the market no longer sufficed to settle conflicts between the major capitalist powers, war between them became inevitable.
Having laid waste to whole countries, the material conditions were created for reconstruction and the post-war economic upswing (1948-73). This was a period in which illusions in capitalism were strengthened. Such was the development of the productive forces, with all the social reforms that this allowed – from free healthcare and education, to relatively secure jobs and reasonable wages – that the idea that a revolutionary overthrow of the system was necessary seemed to have lost its relevance.
This explains why the ideas of reformism, i.e. that it is possible to gradually improve the living conditions of working people without revolution, were strengthened. It also explains the dominance in all countries of leaders in the labour movement who professed these ideas.
Genuine revolutionary Marxism was inevitably isolated in that period. But as Marx had explained, that same period was preparing the way for a new crisis of the system. That came in the early 1970s, with the first worldwide slump of the capitalist economy since the Second World War.
With the crisis came a tidal wave of class struggle that swept the world. How did the capitalist class recover from that period? On the one hand, in the same way as they did at the end of the first and second world wars, by using the reformist leaders of the working class – the leaders of both the trade unions and the mass political parties of the working class – to channel the class struggle down safe lines. The authority of these leaders had been strengthened during the post-war upswing of 1948-73, and they were able to exploit this to hold back and stifle the class struggle.
They appealed to the working class to accept temporary sacrifices in order to get back to the ‘good old days’ of the economic upswing, reassuring workers that this was the only way to solve the crisis of the system. They thus proceeded to implement austerity measures that the bosses were demanding. This was later followed by a wave of privatisations, while at the same time hugely expanding credit to stimulate consumption, and thereby the market.
This seemed to be working for a period, but as a consequence debt began to reach unsustainable levels, and thus we saw how this diminished “the means whereby crises are prevented”, leading to the 2008 financial crisis. History has now come full circle, and we are once again in the midst of a deep crisis of the system.
The Communist Manifesto also predicted that capitalism, having emerged in a few countries, such as Britain, would spread to every corner of the world, as we can see in these words:
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
This describes exactly what we have seen in capitalist development since the days of Karl Marx. The ever-growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires, while billions live in poverty, confirms another of Marx’s predictions about the concentration of capital.
This process is clearly evident in the most powerful capitalist country on the planet, the United States, where the top 10 per cent of households own more than two-thirds of the country’s wealth. This concentration significantly increased over the last few decades, and continues to do so. Globally, the top five corporations earn more than the poorest 2 billion people in the world.
Conversely, the share of global wealth going to workers in the form of wages has been falling systematically for years. Since 1980, the workers have lost between 6 and 8 per cent, around $6 trillion a year, and the levels of poverty worldwide have been growing. According to a 2024 report from the World Bank Group, 8.5 per cent of the world population lives in extreme poverty, while around 3.5 billion people, or 44 per cent of the global population, live on less than $6.85 per day.
Marx and Engels, however, also pointed out that what the bourgeoisie produces, “above all, are its own grave diggers” and that “its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”. The number of metalworkers today has risen above the figure of 400 million globally. And if one includes all wage-workers, then the grave-diggers of capitalism today are counted in their billions. The working class has never been so strong both numerically and in terms of its specific weight in society.
These figures – and there are many more – serve to underline the fact that the analysis developed in the pages of The Communist Manifesto is as relevant, if not more relevant, today as when it was first written.
Fred Weston
From ‘The essence of revolutionary communism: new introduction to the “Classics of Marxism”’, Marxist.com
20 June 2025