The Communist Manifesto is an 1848 political manifesto by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that laid out the program of the Communist League. It contains Marx and Engels' theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be, replaced by socialism, and then finally Communism. KARL MARX (1818-1883) was a philosopher, social scientist, historian and political revolutionary. He is indisputably the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th-century. Although scholars largely ignored him in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement only after his death. Born to a bourgeois family, FREDERICK ENGELS (1820-1895) devoted his life to struggling for the poor and oppressed. As a man of principle, he spent much of his time developing theoretical ideas and to his 50-year commitment to revolutionary socialism. Engels sustained an equally strong personal commitment to Karl Marx, who he supported politically, financially and with a deep friendship for 40 years, until the relationship was, broken by Marx's death in 1883.