POSC 2100
Marx and Engels’s
Communist
Manifesto
| Winter 2026
The Burdens of
Name Recognition
A THEORIST
OF CRISIS
Marx’s political thinking is based
on his first-hand experience of the
Industrial Revolution and its
human costs.
Q.
Is it possible to create
a new world?
“Apart from the general anarchy which has
erupted among the reformers, each is
compelled to confess to himself that he has
no clear conception of what the future should
be. That, however, is just the advantage of the
new trend: that we do not attempt
dogmatically to prefigure the future, but
want to find the new world only through
criticism of the old … I am speaking a ruthless
criticism of everything existing … The criticism
must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor
of conflict with the powers that be.”
— Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything”, p. 13.
PLAN FOR TODAY
01
QUESTION
EVERTHING
02
03
HISTORICAL
MATERIALISM
04
POLITICAL RIGHTS
AREN’T HELPING
01
QUESTION EVERYTHING
BIOGRAPHY
BORN
In 1818 in Trier, Prussia, to an
educated Jewish family of
lawyers.
EDUCATED
At the universities of Bonn,
Berlin, and Jena, moonlighting as
a journalist for radical
newspapers.
COLLABORATES
MARX
With lifelong partner Friedrich
Engels after being expelled from
Prussia, Paris and Brussels, finally
settling in London.
“The philosophers have
only interpreted the world,
in various ways; the point is
to change it.”
— Marx, Broadview Anthology, p. 694.
CRITICAL
INTERVENTIONS
Circulated in 1848, the Communist
Manifesto is a correction of the ideas of
previous workers’ movements and a
statement of the principles of the
communist movement going forward.
It combines Marx’s philosophical
training with Engels’s insights (as a
factory owner) into the plight of the
working class.
02
POLITICAL RIGHTS AREN’T HELPING
What’s Wrong
with Universal
Political Rights?
TWO TYPES OF EMANCIPATION
POLITICAL
HUMAN
The granting of individual
rights to citizens by the state,
marking off the aspects of
their lives that are private
(and thus non-political).
The removal of “public/private”
distinctions that prevent
people from addressing the
barriers to truly relating as free
equals.
“Human emancipation will only be
complete when the real, individual man
[the private rights-bearing individual] has
absorbed into himself the abstract citizen;
when as an individual man, in his everyday
life, in his work, and in his relationships, he
has become a species-being; when he has
recognized and organized his own powers
(forces propre) as social powers so that he
no longer separates this social power from
himself as political power.”
— Marx, Broadview Anthology, p. 669.
03
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
“Does it require deep insight to
comprehend that people’s ideas, views
and conceptions—in a word, their
consciousness—changes with their
conditions of existence, their social
relations and their life in society?”
“What does the history of ideas indicate
other than that intellectual production
changes along with material production?
The ruling ideas of any age are always
the ideas of the ruling class.”
— Marx and Engels, Broadview Anthology, p. 709.
MODES OF
PRODUCTION
Societies are organized to satisfy
human material needs, through
different means and relations of
production.
HOW DOES THE MODE OF PRODUCTION SHAPE SOCIETY?
social organization
(e.g., legal practices; political institutions; religious
and educational organizations; etc.)
social
superstructure
legitimizes
determines
social ideas
(e.g., ideologies; cultural norms; artistic expressions;
consumption patterns; personal values; etc.)
means of production
(e.g., tools; technology; factories; labor; raw
materials and resources; etc.)
relations of production
economic
base
(e.g., patricians and plebians; lords and
serfs; bourgeoise and proletariat; etc.)
“The history of all society hitherto is the
history of class struggles. Freeman and
slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf,
guild-master and journeyman, in short,
oppressor and oppressed, situated in
constant opposition to one another,
carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,
now open, conflict, a fight that each time
ended in a revolutionary transformation
of the entire society or in the common
ruin of the contending classes.”
— Marx and Engels, Broadview Anthology, p. 695.
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
4.
era of mercantilism
(guilds v. artisans)
2.
era of slavery
(patricians v. plebians)
6.
era of communism
(workers)
economic
base
n
revolutio
r e v o l u ti o
mode of
production
on
3.
era of feudalism
(lords v. serfs)
mode of
production
r e v o l u ti
social
superstructure
mode of
production
legitimizes
(tribal families)
mode of
production
on
on
1.
pre-class society
mode of
production
revoluti
r e v o l u ti
mode of
production
n
end of history
5.
era of capitalism
(bourgeoisie v. proletarians)
* revolutions in mode of production change how society is organized, creating class antagonisms that don’t get resolved until a new mode of
production revolutionizes society, which in turn creates new class antagonisms … and the process continues dialectically as h istory progresses.
BOURGEOISIE V.
PROLETARIAT
The emerging class of capitalist business
owners and merchants (i.e., “bourgeoisie”)
controls the means of production, and
exploits the labour power of the masses
(i.e., “proletariat”) in exchange for a wage.
“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted
from the ruins of feudal society has not done
away with class antagonisms. It has but
established new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the
old ones.”
—Marx and Engels, Broadview Anthology, p. 696.
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has
put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
remorselessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that
bound people to their natural superiors … It has drowned
the heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous
enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the ice-cold
water of egotistical calculation … in place of exploitation,
veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted
public, shameless, direct, blatant exploitation.”
— Marx and Engels, Broadview Anthology, p. 696.
NEXT TIME
Why must
capitalism fail?