The Past and Future of Socialism: The Communist Manifesto at 150

Marx and Engels were thirty and twenty-eight when the Manifesto was published in an infinitesimal Ger man edition in February 1848. A tiny group of workers and intellectuals, the League of the Communists, had commissioned a statement of prin ciples late in 1847. It was approved at a meeting in London a few months later. These small beginnings were no measure of the later impact of the Manifesto. By the 1870s it had be come the most influential revolu tionary document written in the nineteenth century.