“You pay us just enough so we don’t quit and we work just hard enough so you don’t fire us.” These words said by a sullen warehouse manager in 1992 struck me as a succinct definition of the class struggle first articulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Commissioned and published in 1848 in London by the Communist League as a statement of its principles, the short pamphlet articulated Marx and Engels’ theories about class struggle in society and politics, the problems of capitalism, and how capitalism would eventually evolve into socialism. There are four sections. "Bourgeois and Proletarians" elucidates the materialist concept of history, in which an oppressed proletariat majority lives under the dominion of an oppressive bourgeois minority. "Proletarians and Communists" positions communists as advocates for the general will of the working class and proposes the abolition of private property and the adoption of state-owned production, universal employment, free public education, centralized banking and credit, and nationalized communication and transportation. "Socialist and Communist Literature" distinguishes communism from other socialist doctrines of the time. "Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties” briefly discusses the struggles in specific countries, predicts a world revolution, and calls for unified international proletarian action. The Manifesto arose at the time of revolutions across Europe in 1848 and fell into obscurity until the Paris Commune of 1871, after which it grew in popularity along with the growth of social-democratic parties across Europe, culminating in the Russian Revolution in 1917.

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