BY this time Marx already had to his credit such landmarks as The Holy Family (1845, written jointly with Engels) and Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and Engels, The Condition of Working Class in England (1844) and Principles of Communism (1847). The two friends had been working closely together since 1844 on various theoretical projects (writing The German Ideology, for example) and political organisational initiatives, as described above. Both worked in the Deutsche-Briisseler-Zeitung, a democratic-socialist fortnightly founded, incidentally, by a suspected police informer (without knowing this, of course) and turned it into an undeclared organ of the League.

Their first-hand experience of political work among workers, their interactions with various democratic forces and the intense, wide-ranging debates they had to conduct with Weitling, Bakunin and others – all these had helped the duo shape up their distinct world outlook and political-organisational views. Now, immediately after the congress, they conferred for days together in London and Brussels on how best to give concrete shape to their shared wealth of ideas. Marx then worked for a whole month to actually write down the document, to some extent drawing on the Principles.

He completed the work just on the deadline, after the CC had warned from London that should he fail to do his job by February 1, 1848, the task would be handed over to someone else. The pamphlet was published from London in German towards the end of February 1848, followed by Polish, Danish, French and English editions, while the first Russian one came out in the early 1860s.

Some scholars seem to find it fashionable to describe the Manifesto as a work of Marx alone. But what we noted above, read with Marx’s explicit statement that the Manifesto was “jointly written by Engels and myself”Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume I completely refutes this position. In the last-named preface, Marx also mentioned the independent evolution of Engels’ theoretical thought to the same point as his and made particular mention of “his [Engels’] brilliant sketch on the criticism of economic categories”. So, the Manifesto was definitely a joint work of the co-founders of the communist movement, the modest words of Engels in the Preface to the German Edition of 1883 notwithstanding.

With the publication of this incisive and wide-ranging document, socialism no longer remained a grand utopia. The era of scientific socialism had begun.

Post publication, the Manifesto “had a history of its own”, as Engels wrote in the Preface to the German Edition of 1890. Its popularity rose and fell with crests and troughs in the working class movement, Engels pointed out, but the overall trend certainly was towards wider recognition. After the death of its authors, the classic was printed in all major languages all over the world, as fresh editions in many cases, and to this day it continues to attract new readers every year, everywhere. Beyond Left circles, it has won universal recognition, including from ideological adversaries, as the most widely read, most influential political document and the second best-selling book (after the Bible) of all time.