About “Communist Manifesto (Prologue)”

Marx, and in particular The Communist Manifesto, is a writer whose ideas have soaked into the fabric of popular discourse such that they’re familiar to people who have never come anywhere near the text– they defined the Cold War, for one.

(The first edition of the book, in its original German)

Many of the Manifesto’s most epigrammatic and memorable phrases can naturally be found in the Prologue, most notably, perhaps the “Spectre” haunting Europe. This would be revisted by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx (Full title: Spectres de Marx: l'état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International)

Engels suggested the title in a November 1847 letter to Marx:

“I believe we would do best to drop the catechism form and entitle the thing: Communist Manifesto. Since a certain amount of history has to be related in it, the present form is quite unsuitable.”