February 21: The Communist Manifesto

The Manifesto of the Communist Party, better known as The Communist Manifesto, was published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on this date in 1848. It set out a class-struggle view of history and described capitalism as a powerful engine of production that was destroying “traditional” society (causing “all that is solid” to melt, “all that is holy” to be profaned) and preparing the world for a proletarian revolution that would socialize property and lead to a classless, liberated society. Marx came from lines of rabbis on both sides of his family, but his father had converted to Lutheranism to dodge the disadvantages of being Jewish in German society. Engels was the son of a Protestant industrialist. Their Manifesto was their most accessible document of Marxist ideas and became the Bible of revolutionary and social democratic movements of the 19th and 20th centuries — which, in Europe, were often led or strongly influenced by assimilated Jews (Kautsky, Lasalle, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Luxembourg, Kun, and numerous others).

“Let the ruling classes tremble . . . The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels