The Communist Manifesto New York City. However, by the mid 1870s the "Communist Manifesto" remained Marx and Engels' only work to be even moderately well-known. Over the next forty years, as social-democratic parties rose across Europe and parts of the world, so did the publication of the "Manifesto" alongside them, in hundreds of editions in thirty languages. Marx and Engels wrote a new preface for the 1882 Russian edition, translated by Georgi Plekhanov in Geneva. In it they wondered if Russia could directly become a communist society, or if she would become capitalist first like other European countries. After Marx's death in 1883,
The Communist Manifesto entered political-science syllabuses in universities, which would only expand after the Second World War. For its centenary in 1948, its publication was no longer the exclusive domain of Marxists and academicians; general publishers too printed the "Manifesto" in large numbers. "In short, it was no longer only a classic Marxist document," Hobsbawm noted, "it had become a political classic "tout court"." Even after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, the "Communist Manifesto" remains ubiquitous; Hobsbawm says that "In states without censorship, almost certainly anyone within reach of a good bookshop, and certainly anyone within reach of a