This day in history

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx with the assistance of Friedrich Engels, is published in London on 21 February, 1848.

Karl Marx was born in Prussia in 1818, the son of a Jewish lawyer who converted to Lutheranism. After moving to Paris in 1843, he began a lifelong career as the intellectual leader of the Communist movement. Expelled from France, he settled in Brussels, where he wrote The Communist Manifesto.

The political pamphlet opens with the dramatic words, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism’, and ends by declaring, ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!’

Marx was later expelled from Brussels and moved to London, where he and his family lived in poverty while he continued to publish. There he composed his major work Das Kapital, which prophesied the inevitable self-destruction of the Capitalist system and became the foundation of international Communism. He died penniless and was buried at Highgate Cemetery, but his ideas lived on and fundamentally shaped the 20th century.

Richard Nixon becomes the first American President to visit China, and has an audience with Mao Zedong. 

The Battle of Verdun begins in France.