Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848 during the industrial revolution. He wrote it to incite rebellion; it was not meant to be a piece of historic literature, but that's what it is today. When reading The Communist Manifesto, it's important to keep in mind that it wasn't written for our current political climate. The Communist Manifesto helped to develop Communist ideology, which focuses mainly on big picture class conflict and the resolution of that conflict via the destruction of private property and revolution. Marx thought that capitalism was unstable and unfair. He also valued equality and compliance over individualism.

Marx wanted to fix a problem that we still struggle with in modern society: the domination of the top 1%, over the average worker, or as Marx puts it, the ‘bourgeoisie class over the proletariat.’ According to Marx, the transition from feudal society to industrialism shifted us from varying hierarchies of social classes to two “great hostile camps." The middle class crumbles under the boots of industrial capitalism. People become mere instruments of labor; slaves to the machine, and above all they become slaves to the bourgeois manufacturer. Even family relations are reduced to “mere money relation."

Marx pushes for the abolition of private property. He believes that private property is only a reality for one tenth of the population, the bourgeois, to begin with; so abolishing it is really abolishing bourgeois private property specifically. He argues that while in bourgeois society, labor only serves to increase accumulated labor, in a communist society, it is a way to promote and enrich the existence of the laborers themselves.

An objection to communism is that the abolition of private property might lead to universal laziness by taking away people’s motivation to work. Marx felt that if this were true that universal laziness would have occurred already due to there being very little motivation to work with the bourgeois in control.

If true communism were reached, property would be communal and everything would be as fair as possible according to ability and need. Ideally this would create a great amount of potential for development. Communism could be very beneficial to society because everyone would have what they need to get by. However, private property is in fact motivation to work and that would be a major hindrance to this ideal communist society unless some other motivation was provided.