The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and is recognized as one of the most important and influential political documents in the world. It became one of the principal programmatic statements of the European socialist and communist parties in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is an analysis of the class struggle and the conflicts of capitalism and capitalist mode of production and examines the history from the age of feudalism to 19th-century capitalism. This manifesto became the outline of the beliefs of the Communist movement. The authors believe that Capital has stolen away from the work of the artisan and peasant by building up factories to produce goods cheaply. But the efficiency of Capital depends on the wage laborers who staff the factories and how little they will accept in order to have work. If workers unite in a class struggle against the bourgeois, using riots and strikes as weapons, they will eventually overthrow the bourgeois and replace them as a ruling class. The last paragraph of the manifesto called for the "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions."