The Communist Manifesto (version 2): Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Communist Manifesto (version 2), credited to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Read by Mark F. Smith. The Communist Manifesto was conceived as an outline of the basic beliefs of the Communist movement. The authors believed that the European Powers were universally afraid of the nascent movement, and were condemning as "communist," people or activities that did not actually conform to what the Communists believed. This Manifesto, then, became a manual for their beliefs. In it we find Marx and Engel's rehearsal of the idea that Capital has stolen away the work of the artisan and peasant by building up factories to produce goods cheaply. The efficiency of Capital depends, then, on the wage laborers who staff the factories and how little they will accept in order to have work. This concentrates power and money in a Bourgeois class that profits from the disunity of workers (Proletarians), who only receive a subsistence wage. If workers unite in a class struggle against the bourgeois, using riot and strikes as weapons, they will eventually overthrow the bourgeois and replace them as a ruling class. Communists further believe in and lay out a system of reforms to transform into a classless, stateless society, thus distinguishing themselves from various flavors of Socialism, which would be content to have workers remain the ruling class after the revolution. The Manifesto caused a huge amount of discussion for its support for a forcible overthrow of the existing politics and society. (Summary by Mark F. Smith)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Communist Manifesto (version 2)
• Author credits: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 3
• Listed recording duration: 1:27:55

Catalogue topics

• audio
• communist
• manifesto
• marx
• engels

Track guide

1. 1 - Bourgeois and Proletarians — 36:00
2. 2 - Proletarians and Communists — 23:23
3. 3 - Socialist & Communist Literature; 4 - Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties — 28:35

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.