The Communist League commissions a political manifesto

The committee connected socialist groups across Europe and sought to replace abstract debate with coordinated political exchange. Marx and Engels acted as organizers and polemicists within a...

The committee sought to link socialist groups across borders and coordinate political discussion. This organizing work depended on networks of exiles and workers; the surviving papers...

At its first congress, the League adopted a more explicitly communist program and the slogan “Workers of all countries, unite!” Marx and Engels helped shape the organization, whose international...

Marx’s polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon challenged attempts to imagine social justice without analyzing production, class, and historical change. The book’s dialogue with French socialism was...

Engels wrote a question-and-answer outline for the Communist League, clarifying positions on class, industry, and political change. It became a working precursor to the Manifesto and shows Engels’s...

Commissioned by the Communist League and written principally by Marx with Engels’s collaboration, the Manifesto analyzed capitalism’s globalizing power and called for working-class political action....

The revolutions of 1848 opened space for democratic and republican politics. Marx and Engels returned to organize and publish, joining broader struggles against autocracy while arguing for independent...

Marx edited the paper and Engels contributed reporting and analysis. It supported democratic revolution, criticized compromise with monarchies, and treated workers as political actors, while working...

Marx was tried for alleged press offenses connected with the revolutionary newspaper. His acquittal did not end repression: the paper was closed months later and he was expelled. The episode shows...

The lectures, delivered to workers in 1847, were published as a series in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx explained wages as the price of labor-power and linked workers’ bargaining to the wider...