Revolutions of 1848 carried out, occurred in Greater Poland. Next, the middle classes began to agitate. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, working in Brussels, had written "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (published in German in London on February 21, 1848) at the request of the Communist League (an organization consisting principally of German workers). Following the March insurrection in Berlin, they began agitating in Germany. They issued their "Demands of the Communist Party in Germany" from Paris in March; the pamphlet urged unification of Germany, universal suffrage, abolition of feudal duties, and similar middle-class goals. The middle and working classes thus shared a
The Communist Manifesto in theory; Marxist works such as the "Manifesto" or "Das Kapital" were read primarily by party theoreticians. On the other hand, small, dedicated militant parties and Marxist sects in the West took pride in knowing the theory; Hobsbawm says "This was the milieu in which 'the clearness of a comrade could be gauged invariably from the number of earmarks on his Manifesto. Following the October Revolution of 1917 that swept the Vladimir Lenin-led Bolsheviks to power in Russia, the world's first socialist state was founded explicitly along Marxist lines. The Soviet Union, which Bolshevik Russia would become a part of,