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  • Published: 26 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241426111
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

Great Ideas

The Communist Manifesto



Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Arinzé Kene, writer and performer of Olivier Award nominated Misty, and also known for his roles in Youngers, Informer and Eastenders. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones.


The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes, is one of the most important and influential political theories ever formulated. After four years of collaboration the authors produced this incisive account of their idea of Communism, in which they envisage a society without classes, private property or a state. They argue that increasing exploitation of industrial workers will eventually lead to a revolution in which Capitalism is overthrown. This vision provided the theoretical basis of political systems in Russia, China, Cuba and Eastern Europe, affecting the lives of millions. The Communist Manifesto still remains a landmark text: a work that continues to influence and provoke debate on capitalism and class.

(c) 1888, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (P) 2019 Penguin Audio

  • Published: 26 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241426111
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

About the authors

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Prussia. While attending university in Berlin he was influenced by the ideas of the philosopher Hegel and his critics, the Young Hegelians, but Marx eventually rejected both schools of thought. He quickly earned the reputation of a revolutionary and left Germany for Paris, where he met his lifelong friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Together they wrote and published The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848, just before the first wave of revolutions in France. Marx returned to Germany but his radical activities led to expulsion, whereupon he moved to London. There, Marx and Engels collaborated on further works on economics and contemporary politics. Marx also wrote his major treatise, Das Kapital, but only the first volume was published in his lifetime. Marx died in poverty on March 14, 1883, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (1820-95) was the son of a Manchester factory owner. He wrote several groundbreaking essays on contemporary social and political conditions in Britain, including The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), in which he criticised the working conditions and treatment of the urban poor. After Karl Marx' death, Engels completed and published the last two volumes of Das Kapital (1884, 1894) from his friend's surviving papers.