Workers Of The World Unite You

This is the closing line of The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Friedrich Engels and published in February 1848 on the eve of a wave of revolutions across Europe. The German original reads "Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!" The phrase "nothing to lose but your chains" was a deliberate rhetorical inversion of the conservative argument that workers had a stake in the existing order. The Manifesto was commissioned by the Communist League and initially had limited impact, gaining influence only after the Paris Commune of 1871.