The Communist Manifesto In his essay, “Big Leagues: Specters of Milton and Republican International Justice between Shakespeare and Marx,” Christopher N. Warren makes the case that English poet John Milton also had a substantial influence on Marx and Engel’s work. Historians of 19th-century reading habits have confirmed that Marx and Engels would have read these authors, and it is known that Marx loved Shakespeare, in particular. Milton, Warren argues, also shows a notable influence on "The Communist Manifesto": “Looking back on Milton’s era, Marx saw a historical dialectic founded on inspiration in which freedom of the press, republicanism, and revolution were closely joined.”
The Communist Manifesto and non-socialist trade unions. Marx himself, later in his life, acknowledged that the middle-class was not disappearing in his work "Theories of Surplus Value" (1863). The obscurity of the later work means that Marx's acknowledgement of this error is not well known. George Boyer described the "Manifesto" as "very much a period piece, a document of what was called the 'hungry' 1840s." Many have drawn attention to the passage in the "Manifesto" that seems to sneer at the stupidity of the rustic: "The bourgeoisie ... draws all nations ... into civilisation ... It has created enormous cities ... and thus