Influences on Karl Marx was "much more important and copious than Darwin". Although there is no mention of Darwin in "The Communist Manifesto" (published eleven years prior to "The Origin of Species"), Marx includes two explicit references to Darwin and evolution in the second edition of "Das Kapital", in two footnotes where he relates Darwin's theory to his opinion about production and technology development. In the Volume I, Chapter 14: "The Detail Labourer and his implements", Section 2, Marx referred to Darwin's "Origin of Species" as an "epoch-making work" while in Chapter 15, Section I took on the comparison of organs of plants to
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,