A new beautiful edition of The Communist Manifesto, combined with Lenin’s key revolutionary tract
It was the 1917 Russian Revolution that transformed the scale of the Communist Manifesto, making it the key text for socialists everywhere. On the centenary of this upheaval, this volume pairs Marx and Engels’s most famous work with Lenin’s own revolutionary manifesto, The April Theses, which lifts politics from the level of everyday banalities to become an art-form.
The Communist Manifesto
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
The Communist Manifesto is the most influential political book ever written—few others have fundamentally changed the world. The book remains both an essential guide to the transformations wrought by capitalism and presents the solution to its inequalities and exploitation.
It was not until the 1917 Russian Revolution that the Manifesto became the key text for radicals the world over; here it is coupled with Lenin’s manifesto The April Theses, picking up where Marx and Engels left off. This landmark edition includes a new introduction by Tariq Ali, showing how the Russian Revolution changed the world and the horizon of political change, and why its ambition is still relevant today.
The April Theses
“We must take the initiative in creating a revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and against the ‘Centre.’”
In Lenin’s April Theses, written in April 1917, he presented his ten directives, and they became the key programme for the revolution carried out that year. We present them here alongside his Letters from Afar, all written from exile in March 1917 to his comrades in Petrograd in the aftermath of the February revolution, offering advice and instructions to push the revolution onward.
An introduction by Tariq Ali traces The Communist Manifesto’s influence on Lenin’s April Theses, the text that brought the manifesto to life and made it one of the most widely read books in history.
About the Authors
Karl Marx was born in 1818, in the Rhenish city of Trier, the son of a successful lawyer. He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, completing his doctorate in 1841. In Paris three years later, Marx was introduced to the study of political economy by a former fellow student, Frederick Engels. In 1848 they collaborated in writing The Communist Manifesto. Expelled from Prussia in the same year, Marx took up residence first in Paris and then in London where, in 1867 he published his magnum opus Capital. A co-founder of the International Workingmen's Association in 1864, Marx died in London in 1883.
Friedrich Engels was born in 1820, in the German city of Barmen. Brought up as a devout Calvinist he moved to England in 1842 to work in his father's Manchester textile firm. After joining the fight against the counter revolution in Germany in 1848 he returned to Manchester and the family business, finally settling there in 1850. In subsequent years he provided financial support for Marx and edited the second and third volumes of Capital. He died whilst working on the fourth volume in 1895.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924), better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He played a leading role in the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917.
