Karl Marx (1818–83) did not write a comprehensive or even exemplary work of political theory. Instead he addressed himself as a political agent to a politics of democratic constitutionalism and revolutionary communism, and to a detailed critique of the economics of the day. It is from those works that his contributions to political theory can be constructed and assessed.

Manifesto of the Communist Party

Marx has left us one work that outlines his views – Manifesto of the Communist Party, first published in 1848. This small pamphlet appeared quite fortuitously on the very eve of democratic upheaval and constitutional revolution. His previous writings, largely unavailable to the nineteenth-century audience, play a role in our reading of the Manifesto today, and they amplify, as well as explain, some of the arguments made in its pages. For Marx's political writings before 1848, the reader should consult the companion volume in this series, Marx: Early Political Writings, edited and introduced by Joseph O'Malley with Richard A. Davis. The Manifesto is particularly useful in structuring a reading of Marx's later writings, such as those contained in the present volume, since it introduces and develops a perspective without which the detailed propositions that may be abstracted from Marx's subsequent works are of little use.

Ostensibly the Manifesto was written for a small group of selfstyled communists who considered themselves representative of discontented workers.