Communism was a major influence in the twentieth century and is still influential in many parts of the world, notably China, southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as among social theorists. One hundred and seventy years ago, the revolutionary socialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote a short pamphlet called The Manifesto of the Communist Party, which provides a compact, though complex, guide to its main principles. A German revolutionary group, the Communist League, commissioned Marx and Engels to write a party programme for them. It was initially published in German in February 1848, the first English translation appeared 2 years later, and it has since been translated into more than 200 languages.
The Communist Manifesto addressed a number of key issues that defined the era in which it was written. This was a time of socioeconomic upheaval and political turmoil caused by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. Marx and Engels reflected on the changes that capitalism had gone through during the transition from the feudal era to the industrial age:
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