The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Communist Manifesto, often referred to as the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is one of the most influential political treatises in history. It is a manifesto commissioned by the Communist League from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels between 1847 and 1848, and first published in London on February 21, 1848.

It is an early text by Marx and Engels, already reflecting the fundamentals of Marxism, including the materialist conception of history. However, it still predates the development of Marxist economics, as well as the historical events that would render some aspects of the manifesto obsolete, according to Marx and Engels themselves.

The Theses on Feuerbach are eleven short philosophical notes written in 1845. They summarize a critique of the ideas of the young post-Hegelian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. However, this text is usually considered more broadly, since it criticizes the contemplative materialism of the young Hegelians in all forms of philosophical idealism.

The theses would come to explicitly underline the role that praxis, action, was to play according to the Marxist worldview. In doing so, Marx intended to make the break with Hegel that the idealists -among them Feuerbach- had failed to achieve. These idealists would make, according to Marx's critique, a powerful but too abstract philosophy.