Listening to the Past Chapter 22, Karl Marx's "Manifesto"

Karl Marx was a German philosopher and economist who is most famous for his theory called Marxian Socialism, better known as communism. Marx agreed with many of the basic tenets of socialism, but disagreed with the main idea that the rich would help the poor in a socialistic society. Marx believed in his form of socialism that the interests of the middle class and those of the industrial working class were always opposed to each other. Marx in his studies predicted that the poor working class would inevitably revolt against the upper class with violence, and a new, classless regime would be put in place. Everything would be owned by the government, and everyone would be given what they needed to survive by the government. Marx's most famous work The Communist Manifesto, which he wrote along with Friedrich Engels, would soon become the communist/socialist "bible" of the time. In it he urged workers to unite and revolt against the noble class, as they were much more vast and powerful than they realized, and they had nothing to lose but the chains that bound them.

Excerpt from The Communist Manifesto
"The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social-Democrats against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution...
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin. 
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution...
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. 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!