On February 21, 1848, The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx with the assistance of Friedrich Engels, is published in London by a group of German-born revolutionary socialists known as the Communist League. The political pamphlet–arguably the most influential in history–proclaimed that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” and that the inevitable victory of the proletariat, or working class, would put an end to class society forever. Originally published in German as Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (“Manifesto of the Communist Party”), the work had little immediate impact. Its ideas, however, reverberated with increasing force into the 20th century, and by 1950 nearly half the world’s population lived under Marxist governments.
READ MORE: How Are Socialism and Communism Different?
Karl Marx was born in Trier, Prussia, in 1818–the son of a Jewish lawyer who converted to Lutheranism. He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Berlin and Jena and initially was a follower of G.W.F. Hegel, the 19th-century German philosopher who sought a dialectical and all-embracing system of philosophy. In 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal democratic newspaper in Cologne. The newspaper grew considerably under his guidance, but in 1843 the Prussian authorities shut it down for being too outspoken. That year, Marx moved to Paris to co-edit a new political review.
Paris was at the time a center for socialist thought, and Marx adopted the more extreme form of socialism known as communism, which called for a revolution by the working class that would tear down the capitalist world. In Paris, Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, a fellow Prussian who shared his views and was to become a lifelong collaborator. In 1845, Marx was expelled from France and settled in Brussels, where he renounced his Prussian nationality and was joined by Engels.
During the next two years, Marx and Engels developed their philosophy of communism and became the intellectual leaders of the working-class movement. In 1847, the League of the Just, a secret society made up of revolutionary German workers living in London, asked Marx to join their organization. Marx obliged and with Engels renamed the group the Communist League and planned to unite it with other German worker committees across Europe. The pair were commissioned to draw up a manifesto summarizing the doctrines of the League.
Back in Brussels, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in January 1848, using as a model a tract Engels wrote for the League in 1847. In early February, Marx sent the work to London, and the League immediately adopted it as their manifesto. Many of the ideas in The Communist Manifesto were not new, but Marx had achieved a powerful synthesis of disparate ideas through his materialistic conception of history. The Manifesto opens with the dramatic words, “A spectre is haunting Europe–the spectre of communism,” and ends by declaring: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!”
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx predicted imminent revolution in Europe. The pamphlet had hardly cooled after coming off the presses in London when revolution broke out in France on February 22 over the banning of political meetings held by socialists and other opposition groups. Isolated riots led to popular revolt, and on February 24 King Louis-Philippe was forced to abdicate. The revolution spread like brushfire across continental Europe. Marx was in Paris on the invitation of the provincial government when the Belgian government, fearful that the revolutionary tide would soon engulf Belgium, banished him. Later that year, he went to the Rhineland, where he agitated for armed revolt.
The bourgeoisie of Europe soon crushed the Revolution of 1848, and Marx would have to wait longer for his revolution. He went to London to live and continued to write with Engels as they further organized the international communist movement. In 1864, Marx helped found the International Workingmen’s Association–known as the First International–and in 1867 published the first volume of his monumental Das Kapital–the foundation work of communist theory. By his death in 1883, communism had become a movement to be reckoned with in Europe. Thirty-four years later, in 1917, Vladimir Lenin, a Marxist, led the world’s first successful communist revolution in Russia.
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“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
― Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” ― Karl Marx
Under the freedom of trade the whole severity of the laws of political economy will be applied to the working classes. Is that to say that we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon a greater extent of territory, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions into a single group, where they stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletarians.
Engels, To Free Trade Congress at Brussels (1847)
“The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.”
~ Carroll Quigley
“The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control. … Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.”
~ Larry P. McDonald
U.S. Congressman, 1976, killed in the Korean Airlines 747 that was shot down by the Soviets
in “Introduction” to The Rockefeller File, by Gary Allen (1975)
https://archive.org/details/TheRockefellerFile
“I do not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconcilable. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution and vision divide us from all of you forever . . . I have no doubt that when Germany and England and America will long have lost their present identity or name or purpose, we shall still be strong in ours . . . We have joined your capitalistic world in deliberate emulation and rivalry: yet Jewish socialism and Jewish socialists are the banner bearers of the world’s “armies of liberation.” . . . But you feel our disruptive difference most keenly, most resentfully, in our deliberate efforts to change your social system. Seen in the dazzling lights of your desires and needs our ideal is repellently morose . . . Because your chief institution is the social structure itself, it is in this that we are most manifestly destroyers. We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands.”
You Gentiles
By Samuel, Maurice, 1895-1972
https://archive.org/details/YouGentiles
“The Nazis came to power in Germany on 1933, at time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Yet through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began. “
Henry C K Liu
World Order, Failed States and Terrorism
PART 10: Nazism and the German economic miracle
http://henryckliu.com/page105.html
“ World War II ended the “depression.” The same Bankers who in the early 30’s had no loans for peacetime houses,food and clothing, suddenly had unlimited billions to lend for Army barracks, K-rations and uniforms! A nation that in 1934 couldn’t produce food for sale, suddenly could produce bombs to send free to Germany and Japan!… Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 and on, accounting for its startling rise from the depression to a world power in 5 years. Germany financed its entire government and war operation from 1935 to 1945 without gold and without debt, and it took the whole Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the
German power over Europe and bring Europe back under the heel of the Bankers. Such history of money does not even appear in the textbooks of public (government) schools today. ”
Sheldon Emry
Billions For Bankers, Debts for the People
https://archive.org/details/Billions20for20the20bankers
The genius of the bankman is to live off people; not off land, nor off the production of commodities from raw material, but off people. Let other people till the soil; the bankman , if he can, will live off the tiller. Let other people toil at trades and manufacture; the bankman will exploit the fruits of their work. That is his peculiar genius. If this genius be described as parasitic, the term would seem to be justified by a certain fitness.
Henry Ford
(The International Bankman , November 13, 1920)
“For the Marxist reviled the man of faith and ideals as bitterly as he did the financial exploiter. It was his creed that nothing existed in the world but matter and that no motive
could animate and man but self-interest. The great-organized institutions and societies based on faith and love and maintained by self-sacrifice though which man had raised himself above the primeval slime were to be ruthlessly destroyed and their adherents liquidated. First, they were to be undermined by criticism repeated again and again until
the corrosive ate into the old State so thoroughly that finally crumbled to pieces. Mob violence was to finish the process. The world would then be ready for an international
order that admitted of neither separate race, nor tradition, nor religion and in which all men would be subordinated as unthinking automatons to a single ruling clique Marxist intellectuals and bureaucrats .
For Hitler was accurate enough to realize that the Marxists did not stand for the freedom they pretended, but for a despotic uniformity, enforced by terror and annihilation of all who opposed them. In this, they differed only in their superior violence from the international financiers and exploiters they professed to supplant. Like Belloc and other earlier modern socials philosophers, Hitler perceived the twin roads down which mankind was being herded toward the servile state. First came the economic development which changed the social structure of the nation and substituted for its old feudal rulers, who at least had a certain sense of responsibility and noblesse oblige, the financier and the middle man who had none. Under the joint-stock company system, the search for profits became the sole guiding principle for life. The small artisan class slowly disappeared and the factory worker, who took his place, had scarcely any chance establish an independent existence of his own, but soon sank to the proletariat level. His present and future passed into the sole power of the man of figures who, calling himself his employer or master, acknowledged no responsibility for his moral or physical wellbeing. The hungry sheep looked up and were not fed.
The member of the new social class so created were “disinherited “in a treble sense. They were deprived of their independence. They were herded together in vast factory towns under conditions of living and employment that not only ruined their health, but robbed them of all faith in their country and its system of justice. And they were made to feel that the manual labour by which they lived was degrading and inferior to other forms of work. The ancient Order of the Peasantry, as Disraeli had once called it, had been transformed into a herd of helot without privilege or status.
But the process of social leveling was not yet complete. The poor were enslaved, but the higher and middle orders-the last repositories of culture and national social tradition of the past- still remained independent. Their independence was the final barrier that stood between the architects of constructive chaos and their goal. To destroy it no effort could be too great, And here the archenemy of the nation and society, the eternal and denationalized Jew, whom Hitler in his strange obsession saw in all places working to destroy the living state, seized his opportunity. By a masterpiece of ingenuity -“one of the most infamous deceits ever practiced”- the Jew turned the bitterness of the poor, whom his own usurious and irresponsible capitalism had dispossessed, against those who had till now escaped enslavement. “At first he had used the bourgeois class as a battering-ram against the feudal order; now he used the worker against the strongholds of the bourgeois. Just as he had succeeded in obtaining civil rights by intrigue carried on under the protection of the middle class, so now he hoped that joining in the struggle which the workers were waging for their existence he would be able to gain absolute power over them….He kowtowed to the worker, hypocritically pretended to feel pity for him and his lot and even to be indignant at the misery and poverty he had to endure….He showed himself eager to study his hardships, real or imaginary. He strove to waken a longing in the masses to change the conditions under which they lived. Artfully the Jew enkindled that innate yearning for social justice which is a typical Aryan characteristic. Once that desire became conscious it was transformed into hatred against those in more fortunate circumstances of life. The next stage was to give a precise philosophical explanation of this struggle for the elimination of social wrongs. And thus the Marxist doctine was invented.
Yet, the ultimate objective of that sinister Movement was not, it appeared, the triumph of the proletariat, but the domination of those who by exploitation had created the Proletariat – the Jews.”Without knowing it the worker is placing himself at the service of the very power against which he believes he is fighting. In appearance he is made fight against capital, while all the while he is furthering capitalistic interests.” The ultimate aims of Marxism and international Capitalism were in Hitler’s eyes the same: the concentration of all power in the hands of a few, and the elimination of every independent agency that could resist the process. “
Arthur Bryant Unfinished Victory 1940
“Hitler’s real quarrel with the capitalist and Marxist system alike was that they stopped things from growing. They were concerned not with creation, but the one making with making the quick profits and the other with establishing an unnatural and sterile uniformity. Both were destroying quality throughout the world – the quality, not only of things, but , of what was far more serious, of men and women”
Arthur Bryant – Unfinished Victory (1940)
https://archive.org/details/ArthurBryantUnfinishedVictory1940V1/Arthur%20Bryant%20-%20Unfinished%20Victory%20%281940%29%20-%20v1
“Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“If they desire a thing, they declare it is true. If they desire it not, though that were death itself, they cry aloud, ‘It has never been.’”
Rudyard Kipling
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/karl-marx
“Karl Marx, the son of Hirschel and Henrietta Marx, was born in Trier, Germany, on May 5, 1818. Hirschel Marx was a lawyer and to escape anti-Semitism decided to abandon his Jewish faith when Karl was a child. Although the majority of people living in Trier were Catholics, Marx decided to become a Protestant. He also changed his name from Hirschel to Heinrich.
After schooling in Trier (1830-35), Marx entered Bonn University to study law. At university, he spent much of his time socializing and running up large debts. His father was horrified when he discovered that Karl had been wounded in a duel. Heinrich Marx agreed to pay off his son’s debts but insisted that he moved to the more sedate Berlin University.
The move to Berlin resulted in a change in Marx and, for the next few years, he worked hard at his studies. Marx came under the influence of one of his lecturers, Bruno Bauer, whose atheism and radical political opinions got him into trouble with the authorities. Bauer introduced Marx to the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, who had been a professor of philosophy in Berlin until his death in 1831.
Marx was especially impressed by Hegel’s theory that a thing or thought could not be separated from its opposite. For example, the slave could not exist without the master, and vice versa. Hegel argued that unity would eventually be achieved by the equalizing of all opposites, by means of the dialectic (logical progression) of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This was Hegel’s theory of the evolving process of history.
Heinrich Marx died in 1838. Marx now had to earn his own living and he decided to become a university lecturer. After completing his doctoral thesis at the University of Jena, Marx hoped that his mentor, Bruno Bauer, would help find him a teaching post. However, in 1842 Bauer was dismissed as a result of his outspoken atheism and was unable to help.
Marx now tried journalism but his radical political views meant that most editors were unwilling to publish his articles. He moved to Cologne where the city’s liberal opposition movement was fairly strong. Known as the Cologne Circle, this liberal group had its own newspaper, The Rhenish Gazette. The newspaper published an article by Marx where he defended the freedom of the press. The group was impressed by the article and, in October 1842, Marx was appointed editor of the newspaper.
In Cologne, Karl Marx met Moses Hess, a radical who called himself a socialist. Marx began attending socialist meetings organized by Hess. Members of the group told Marx of the sufferings being endured by the German working class and explained how they believed that only socialism could bring this to an end. Based on what he heard at these meetings, Marx decided to write an article on the poverty of the Mosel wine farmers. The article was also critical of the government and soon after it was published in the Rhenish Gazette in January 1843, the newspaper was banned by the Prussian authorities.
Warned that he might be arrested Marx quickly married his girlfriend, Jenny von Westphalen, and moved to Paris where he was offered the post of editor of a new political journal, Franco-German Annals. Among the contributors to the journal were his old mentor, Bruno Bauer, the Russian anarchist, Michael Bakunin, and the radical son of a wealthy German industrialist, Friedrich Engels.
In Paris, Marx began mixing with members of the working class for the first time. Marx was shocked by their poverty but impressed by their sense of comradeship. In an article that he wrote for the Franco-German Annals, Marx applied Hegel’s dialectic theory to what he had observed in Paris. Marx, who now described himself as a communist, argued that the working class (the proletariat), would eventually be the emancipators of society. When published in February 1844, the journal was immediately banned in Germany. Marx also upset the owner of the journal, Arnold Ruge, who objected to his editor’s attack on capitalism.
Marx had now become a close friend of Engels, who had just finished writing a book about the lives of the industrial workers in England. Engels shared Marx’s views on capitalism and, after their first meeting, Engels wrote that there was virtually complete agreement in all theoretical fields. Marx and Engels decided to work together. It was a good partnership, whereas Marx was at his best when dealing with difficult abstract concepts, Engels had the ability to write for a mass audience.
While working on their first article together, The Holy Family, the Prussian authorities put pressure on the French government to expel Marx from the country. On January 25, 1845, Marx received an order deporting him from France. Marx and Engels decided to move to Belgium, a country that permitted greater freedom of expression than any other European state. Marx went to live in Brussels, where there was a sizable community of political exiles, including the man who converted him to socialism, Moses Hess….”
Sincerely,