Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions,
The Communist Manifesto
is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom.
Author Biography: Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, Germany and studied law at Bonn and Berlin. In 1848, he settled in London, where he studied economics and wrote the first volume of his major work,
Das Kapital
, in 1867, with successive volumes following in 1884 and 1894. He lived in London until his death.