From Hegel to Hegelianism

In The Communist Manifesto completed just before the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, its joint authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, depicted communism as a theory which explained how the development of industrial capitalism would lead to a proletarian revolution. In that revolution, private property in the means of production would be abolished, the political state would be superseded, and humanity would enter into a higher state of freedom. Twentieth-century commentators, following the Manifesto's characterisation of modern communism, attempted to relate its genesis to the industrial revolution and the emergence of the working class.