The Communist Manifesto: The Political Classic(Capstone Classics)

Friedrich Engels worked in his family's cotton manufacturing business, but in his private time mixed with radicals. His book The Condition of the Working Class in England was an exposé of the terrible factory conditions and child labour of the time. Engels was Marx's lifelong collaborator, and he edited the unfinished volumes of Das Kapital after Marx's death.

Karl Marx was born in 1818, in the Rhenish city of Trier, the son of a successful lawyer. He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, completing his doctorate in 1841. In Paris three years later, Marx was introduced to the study of political economy by a former fellow student, Frederick Engels. In 1848 they collaborated in writing The Communist Manifesto. Expelled from Prussia in the same year, Marx took up residence first in Paris and then in London where, in 1867 he published his magnum opus Capital. A co-founder of the International Workingmen's Association in 1864, Marx died in London in 1883.