Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto

Creator: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848
Purpose: Promotes communism by highlighting the class struggle and the problems inherent in capitalism.

Manifesto

Aim

For the working class (proletariat) to start a revolution and overthrow the ruling class (bourgeoisie) with the aim to create a classless society.

Selected Quotes

“It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

“The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletariat parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat”.
“…the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property”.

“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!”

Sources

General: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto
View the Complete Text: http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Download the Complete Text: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61
Study Guides: http://www.gradesaver.com/communist-manifesto/study-guide/section5/