The Communist Manifesto in 35 historical photos

The Communist Manifesto is considered a founding document of communism whose ideology was behind a global, and often violent, conflict throughout the 20th century. It inspired revolutionaries in many countries some of whom were successful in overthrowing their own governments such as those of the Russian Revolution. The conflict resulted in tens of millions of deaths in countries as far as Cuba and China. Read the most revolutionary quotes here or scroll below to view the book through historical photos.

“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

An American cartoon, 1911.

“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

El restaurante by Díaz Olano, 1895.

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The new relationship between worker and entrepreneur,” Zurich, Switzerland, 1896.

“The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Hosiery Mill (London, TN 1910)

“These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Women working at the H.J. Heinz can factory, Pittsburgh, 1909.

“[T]he modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Factory workers, location unknown, 1800s.

“Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

The Great Depression, USA, 1930s.

“In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

The Great Depression, USA, 1930s.

“What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Organize and Take the Big Bag,” by Jon Lynch, 1925.

The petite bourgeoisie: “No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

A grocery store in the late 1800s.

“[I]n times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour…a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands…a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists [such as us, Marx and Engels], who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx (right) with his daughters standing next to Friedrich Engels, 1860.

Referring to the Communist revolutionary vanguards: “the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others…they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, St. Petersburg, 1897. Young Vladimir Lenin is in the middle.

Germany: A 1918 demonstration by German Communists in Berlin during the Revolution that followed Germany’s defeat in WWI.

“[T]he violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution 1917.

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution 1917.

Victims of the winter of 1918 Red Terror in Evpatoria. Their corpses were dumped by Bolsheviks executors in the Black sea, but were eventually washed ashore by the tides of the summer.

Bolshevik crimes, 1919: Excavation of a mass grave outside one of the regional headquarters of the Cheka (Soviet secret police)

“Of course, in the beginning, [change] cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Italy: Workers occupying factories and overthrowing their management, Turin, 1919.

France: the 1936 demonstrations and strikes led by the Communist Party among other left-leaning parties brought the country to a halt.

Czechoslovakia: demonstrations in Prague before the 1948 Communist takeover (known as the Czech coup)

Czechoslovakia: Red Militia marching in Prague, 1948

China: The Cultural Revolution spearheaded by Mao Zedong and the Communist Party, 1966.

China: The Cultural Revolution spearheaded by Mao Zedong and the Communist Party, 1966.

Cambodian refugee children, who fled with their families the Khmer Rouge raids, wait for food at an aid station near Phnom Penh in 1975.

Khmer Rouge fighters standing guard watching forced labourers dig a water canal. Photo dates from 1976.

Rooms of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum contain thousands of photos taken by the Khmer Rouge of their victims. They took photos of those they seized at the start and the end of their detention, where they were often dead as a result of torture. The atrocities, under the leadership of Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979, resulted in around 2 million victims filling up sites known as the Killing Fields.

Vladimir Lenin addressing Red Army troops in 1920

Vladimir Lenin, Petrograd, 1917

Mao Zedong with supporters, 1968.

Fidel Castro at a rally in Havana, 1962.

“The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Fidel Castro (far left) and Che Guevara (middle) marching in Havana, Cuba, in 1960.

A 1918 photo of Leon Trotsky, head of the Red Army, standing among soldiers fighting the Russian Civil War (1917-1922).

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Delegates of the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 1919. Stalin, Lenin and Kalinin (left to right) are in the middle.

Trotsky, Lenin, and Kamenev (left to right), 1920, Moscow.

Che Guevara, near the end of the Cuban Revolution, Havana, 1959.

Marina Ginestà, a communist militant during the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona, 1936.

Leon Trotsky at a parade, Moscow, 1918.

Red Guards of the Vulkan factory in Petrograd, Oct. 1917.

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” ― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Putilov Plant, Petrograd, meeting of factory workers (July 1920).

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