Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, "The Communist Manifesto" is a condensed and incisive account of the world view Marx and Engles developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom.

"Does the closing of the cold war era open up the possibility of reading the Communist Manifesto in new ways? In this edition of Marx and Engels's classic text, Toews proposes new guidelines for reassessing the work to help students reconstruct the meaning of the Manifesto in its time and at the close of the twentieth century. Together with the complete text of the work, this brief volume includes some key foundational documents by Hegel, Marx, Engels,...