I'm going to stretch here about what constitutes “culture.” To an anthropoligist, culture is everything: language, religion, government, work, kinship and social relations, sexuality, today’s “pop culture,” in short, everything that plays a part in our lives. But in my opinion, the wost important, world-turning event of the 1840s was the publication of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The Communist Manifesto, original editionThis little book would exert a profound effect on world history. By 1870, the world’s first communist revolution took place in Paris, as the Paris Commune. It failed, crushed by the Prussian Army, but was an inspiration for generations across the world.

Marx is best known for the slogan “Workers of the World Unite — You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Chains.” But perhaps more enduring is his notion that “All history is the history of class struggle.” He wasn’t right about “all” history, but if you eliminate that one word, he was very much on the mark.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German-born philosopher, historian, and revolutionary. He is best known for The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, and Capital (Das Kapital), first published in 1867 but revised many times until 1894.

Marx lived in poverty, doing much of his writing at a table in the British Museum. He was relatively unknown during his lifetime, but profoundly influential in the century that followed.