The Communist Manifesto Part II (1848)
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Manifesto
of the Communist Party
Part II
1848
Bourgeois and Proletarians | Proletarians and Communists
| Socialist and Communist Literature | Position
of the Communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties | Preface to 1872 German edition | Preface to
1882 Russian edition | Preface to 1883 German edition | Preface to 1888 English edition | Preface to
1890 German edition | Notes on the Manifesto and translations of it
While this True Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for
fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary
interest, the interest of German philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a
relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under the
various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The
industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain
destruction — on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the
rise of a revolutionary proletariat. True Socialism appeared to kill these two
birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the
dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped
their sorry eternal truths, all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase
the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part German socialism
recognized, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the
petty-bourgeois philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the
German petty philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model
man, it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real
character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the brutally
destructive tendency of communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial
contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called socialist and
communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this
foul and enervating literature. [3]
2. CONSERVATIVE OR BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to
secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the
condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the
prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every
imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete
systems.
We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty as an example of this form.
The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without
the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state
of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a
bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which
it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception
into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such
a system, and thereby to march straightaway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires
in reality that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but
should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism sought to
depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that
no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in
economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material
conditions of existence, this form of socialism, however, by no means understands
abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only
by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these
relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and
labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of
bourgeois government.
Bourgeois socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere
figure of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of
the working class. Prison reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last
word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the
working class.
3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great
modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the
writings of Babeuf [4] and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of
universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing
to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the
economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and
could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature
that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary
character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
The socialist and communist systems, properly so called,
those of Saint-Simon [5], Fourier [6], Owen [7], and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period,
described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1.
Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action
of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet
in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative
or any independent political movement.
Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of
industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the
material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a
new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created
conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class
organization of the proletariat to an organization of society especially contrived by
these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and
the practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests
of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of
being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes
Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They
want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored.
Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay,
by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people when once they understand their
system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to
attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of
example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is
still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position,
correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction
of society.
But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical element. They
attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable
materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in
them — such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family,
of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage
system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state
into a more superintendence of production — all these proposals point solely to the
disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and
which, in these publications, are recognized in their earliest indistinct and undefined
forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian character.
The significance of critical-utopian socialism and communism
bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class
struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the
contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical
justifications. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many
respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary
sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the
progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavor, and that
consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They
still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated phalansteres,
of establishing Home Colonies, or setting up a Little Icaria [8] — pocket editions of the New Jerusalem — and to realize all these
castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the
bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative
socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by
their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social
science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working
class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new
gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the
Chartists and the Reformistes.
FOOTNOTES
[1] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition:
Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830).
[2] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition:
This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large
portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover,
extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier
british aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for
declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock
companies.
[3] NOTE by Engels to 1888 German edition:
The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its
protagonists of the desire to dabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical
type of this tendency is Mr Karl Gruen.
[4] Francois Noel Babeuf (1760-1797):
French political agitator; plotted unsuccessfully to destroy the Directory in
revolutionary France and established a communistic system.
[5] Comte de Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de
Rouvroy (1760-1825): French social philosopher; generally regarded as founder of French
socialism. He thought society should be reorganized along industrial lines and that
scientists should be the new spiritual leaders. His most important work is
_Nouveau_Christianisme_ (1825).
[6] Charles Fourier (1772-1837): French
social reformer; propounded a system of self-sufficient cooperatives known as Fourierism,
especially in his work _Le_Nouveau_Monde_industriel_ (1829-30)
[7] Richard Owen (1771-1858): Welsh
industrialist and social reformer. He formed a model industrial community at New Lanark,
Scotland, and pioneered cooperative societies. His books include _New_View_Of_Society_
(1813).
[8] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition:
Home Colonies were what Owen called his communist model societies.
_Phalansteres_ were socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name
given by Caber to his utopia and, later on, to his American communist colony.
IV — POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO
THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES
Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class
parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims,
for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement
of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In
France, the Communists ally with the Social Democrats* against the
conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical
position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the Great
Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this
party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French
sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime
condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Krakow
in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way,
against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty-bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working class the
clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and
proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons
against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must
necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the
reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately
begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the
eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced
conditions of European civilization and with a much more developed proletariat than that
of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the
bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following
proletarian revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the
existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the
property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of
all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their
ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let
the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to
lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
FOOTNOTES
* NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition:
The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc
(1811-82), in the daily press by the Reforme. The name of Social-Democracy
signifies, with these its inventors, a section of the Democratic or Republican Party more
or less tinged with socialism.
PREFACE TO 1872 GERMAN EDITION
The Communist League, an international association of workers, which could of course be
only a secret one, under conditions obtaining at the time, commissioned us, the
undersigned, at the Congress held in London in November 1847, to write for publication a
detailed theoretical and practical programme for the Party. Such was the origin of the
following Manifesto, the manuscript of which travelled to London to be printed a few weeks
before the February Revolution. First published in German, it has been republished in that
language in at least twelve different editions in Germany, England, and America. It was
published in English for the first time in 1850 in the _Red Republican_, London,
translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and in 1871 in at least three different translations
in America. The french version first appeared in Paris shortly before the June
insurrection of 1848, and recently in _Le Socialiste_ of New York. A new translation is in
the course of preparation. A Polish version appeared in London shortly after it was first
published in Germany. A Russian translation was published in Geneva in the ‘sixties. Into
Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its appearance.
However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years,
the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as
ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the
principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on
the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special
stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That
passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic
strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended
organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in
the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat
for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some
details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that
the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it
for its own purposes. (See The Civil
War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s
Assocation, 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is
self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the
present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of
the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle
still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been
entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater
portion of the political parties there enumerated.
But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any
right to alter. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with an introduction bridging the
gap from 1847 to the present day; but this reprint was too unexpected to leave us time for
that.
KARL MARX
FREDERICK ENGELS
June 24, 1872
London
PREFACE TO 1882 RUSSIAN EDITION
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by
Bakunin, was published early in the ‘sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol. Then
the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity.
Such a view would be impossible today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December 1847) is
most clearly shown by the last section: the position of the Communists in relation to the
various opposition parties in various countries. Precisely Russia and the United States
are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all
European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of
Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw materials and were at
the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products. Bother were, therefore, in
one way of another, pillars of the existing European system.
How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North American for a
gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking the very foundations of
European landed property — large and small. At the same time, it enabled the United
States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that
must shortly break the industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England,
existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America
itself. Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the
whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; at the same
time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital funds are
developing for the first time in the industrial regions.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the
European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning
to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction.
Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia forms the
vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable
impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face
with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to
develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can
the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership
of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the
contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes
the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the
signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the
present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist
development.
KARL MARX
FREDERICK ENGELS January 21, 1882
London
PREFACE TO 1883 GERMAN EDITION
The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the
whole working class class of Europe and America owes more than to any one else — rests at
Highgate Cemetary and over his grave the first first grass is already growing. Since his
death [March 13, 1883], there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the
Manifesto. But I consider it all the more necessary again to state the following
expressly:
The basic thought running through the Manifesto — that economic production, and the
structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute
the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently
(ever since the dissolution of the primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has
been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between
dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution; that this
struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the
proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses
it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from
exploitation, oppression, class struggles — this basic thought belongs soley and
exclusively to Marx.
[ENGELS FOOTNOTE TO PARAGRAPH: This proposition, I wrote in the preface to
the English translation, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what
Darwin’s theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for
some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by
my _Conditions of the Working Class in England_. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in
spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms almost as clear as
those in which I have stated it here.]
I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary that it also
stand in front of the Manifesto itself.
FREDERICK ENGELS
June 28, 1883
London
PREFACE TO 1888 ENGLISH EDITION
The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working men’s
association, first exclusively German, later on international, and under the political
conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of
the League, held in November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete
theoretical and practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January 1848, the
manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French Revolution of
February 24. A French translation was brought out in Paris shortly before the insurrection
of June 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George
Julian Harney’s _Red Republican_, London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also
been published.
The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 — the first great battle between
proletariat and bourgeoisie — drove again into the background, for a time, the social and
political aspirations of the European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for
supremacy was, again, as it had been before the Revolution of February, solely between
different sections of the propertied class; the working class was reduced to a fight for
political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of the middle-class Radicals.
Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were
ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the
Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested and, after eighteen
months’ imprisonment, they were tried in October 1852. This selebrated Cologne
Communist Trial lasted from October 4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were
sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years.
Immediately after the sentence, the League was formlly dissolved by the remaining members.
As to the Manifesto, it seemed henceforth doomed to oblivion.
When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the
ruling classes, the International Working Men’s Association sprang up. But this
association, formed with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant
proletariat of Europe and America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in
the Manifesto. The International was bound to have a programme broad enough to be
acceptable to the English trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium,
Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans in Germany.
disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto. But in his first
public agitation, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond demanding co-operative worhsops
supported by state credit.]
Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted
to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from
combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle
against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to
men’s minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way
for a more complete insight into the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And
Marx was right. The International, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite
different men from what it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in
Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative English trade unions, though most of
them had long since severed their connection with the International, were gradually
advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their president could say in
their name: Continental socialism has lost its terror for us. In fact, the
principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of all
countries.
The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since 1850, the German text had been
reprinted several times in Switzerland, England, and America. In 1872, it was translated
into English in New York, where the translation was published in _Woorhull and Claflin’s
Weekly_. From this English version, a French one was made in _Le Socialiste_ of New York.
Since then, at least two more English translations, moer or less mutilated, have been
brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in England. The first Russian
translation, made by Bakunin, was published at Herzen’s Kolokol office in Geneva, about
1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulich, also in Geneva, in 1882. A new Danish
edition is to be found in _Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek_, Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French
translation in _Le Socialiste_, Paris, 1886. From this latter, a Spanish version was
prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted; there
have been twelve altogether at the least. An Armenian translation, which was to be
published in Constantinople some months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because the
publisher was afraid of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the
translator declined to call it his own production. Of further translations into other
languages I have heard but had not seen. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects the
history of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide
spread, the most international production of all socialist literature, the common platform
acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.
Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a _socialist_ manifesto. By
Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian
systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the
position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious
social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to
capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the
working-class movement, and looking rather to the educated classes for
support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency
of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change,
called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism;
still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to
produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany. Thus, in
1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism
was, on the Continent at least, respectable; communism was the very opposite.
And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that the emancipation of the workers
must be the act of the working class itself, there could be no doubt as to which of
the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.
The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the
fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That
in every historical epoch, th prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the
social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which it is built
up, and from that which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of
that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of
primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class
struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; That
the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a
stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class — the proletariat —
cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class — the
bourgeoisie — without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at
large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and class struggles.
This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s
theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years
before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by my
_Conditions of the Working Class in England_. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in
spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms almost as clear as
those in which I have stated it here.
From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the following:
However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five
years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct
today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of
the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times,
on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special
stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That
passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic
strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended
organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in
the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat
for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some
details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that
the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it
for its own purposes. (See _The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council
of the International Working Men’s Assocation_ 1871, where this point is further
developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is
deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that
the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section
IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the
political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from
off the Earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer
any right to alter.
The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater portion of
Marx’s _Capital_. We have revised it in common, and I have added a few notes explanatory
of historical allusions.
FREDERICK ENGELS
January 30, 1888
London
PREFACE TO 1890 GERMAN EDITION
Since [the 1883 German edition preface] was written, a new German edition of the
Manifesto has again become necessary, and much has also happened to the Manifesto which
should be recorded here.
A second Russian translation — by Vera Zasulich — appeared in Geneva in 1882; the
preface to that edition was written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately, the original German
manuscript has gone astray; I must therefore retranslate from the Russian which will in no
way improve the text. It reads:
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by
Bakunin, was published early in the ‘sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol. Then
the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity.
Such a view would be impossible today.What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December
1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position of the Communists in
relation to the various opposition parties in various countries. Precisely Russia and the
United States are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great
reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian
forces of Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw materials
and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products. Both were,
therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing European system.How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North American
for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking the very foundations
of European landed property — large and small. At the same time, it enabled the United
States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that
must shortly break the industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England,
existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America
itself. Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the
whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; at the same
time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital funds are
developing for the first time in the industrial regions.And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes,
but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just
beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European
reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia forms
the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable
impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face
with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to
develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can
the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership
of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the
contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes
the historical evolution of the West?The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes
the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other,
the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a
communist development.January 21, 1882 London
At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: _Manifest
Kommunistyczny_.
Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the _Socialdemokratisk
Bibliothek_, Copenhagen, 1885. Unfortunately, it is not quite complete; certain essential
passages, which seem to have presented difficulties to the translator, have been omitted,
and, in addition, there are saigns of carelessness here and there, which are all the more
unpleasantly conspicuous since the translation indicates that had the translator taken a
little more pains, he would have done an excellent piece of work.
A new French version appeared in 1886, in _Le Socialiste_ of Paris; it is the best
published to date.
From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in _El Socialista_ of
Madrid, and then reissued in pamphlet form: _Manifesto del Partido Communista_ por Carlos
Marx y F. Engels, Madrid, Administracion de El Socialista, Hernan Cortes 8.
As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the manuscript of an Armenian
translation was offered to a publisher in Constantinople. But the good man did not have
the courage to publish something bearing the name of Marx and suggested that the
translator set down his own name as author, which the latter however declined.
After one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate American translations had
been repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version at last appeared in 1888. This
was my friend Samuel Moore, and we went through it together once more before it went to
press. It is entitled: _Manifesto of the Communist_Party_, by Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels. Authorized English translation, edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888,
London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet Street, E.C. I have added some of the notes of that
edition to the present one.
The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with enthusiasm, at the time of its
appearance, by the not at all numerous vanguard of scientific socialism (as is proved by
the translations mentioned in the first place), it was soon forced into the background by
the reaction that began with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally
excommunicated by law in the conviction of the Cologne Communists in November
1852. With the disappearance from the public scene of the workers’ movement that had begun
with the February Revolution, the Manifesto too passed into the background.
When the European workers had again gathered sufficient strength for a new onslaught
upon the power of the ruling classes, the International Working Men’s Association came
into being. Its aim was to weld together into _one_ huge army the whole militant working
class of Europe and America. Therefore it could not _set out_ from the principles laid
down in the Manifesto. It was bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on
the English trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish Proudhonists, and the
German Lassalleans. This programme — the considerations underlying the Statutes of the
International — was drawn up by Marx with a master hand acknowledged even by the Bakunin
and the anarchists. For the ultimate final triumph of the ideas set forth in the
Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon the intellectual development of the working class, as
it necessarily has to ensue from united action and discussion. The events and vicissitudes
in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the successes, could not but
demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy of their former universal panaceas, and make
their minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for
working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The working class of 1874, at the
dissolution of the International, was altogether different from that of 1864, at its
foundation. Proudhonism in the Latin countries, and the specific Lassalleanism in Germany,
were dying out; and even the ten arch-conservative English trade unions were gradually
approaching the point where, in 1887, the chairman of their Swansea Congress could say in
their name: Continental socialism has lost its terror for us. Yet by 1887
continental socialism was almost exclusively the theory heralded in the Manifesto. Thus,
to a certain extent, the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern
working-class movement since 1848. At present, it is doubtless the most widely circulated,
the most international product of all socialist literature, the common programme of many
millions of workers of all countries from Siberia to California.
Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a _socialist_ manifesto. In
1847, two kinds of people were considered socialists. On the one hand were the adherents
of the various utopian systems, notably the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in
France, both of whom, at that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying
out. On the other, the manifold types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social
abuses through their various universal panaceas and all kinds of patch-work, without
hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, people who stood outside the labor
movement and who looked for support rather to the educated classes. The
section of the working class, however, which demanded a radical reconstruction of society,
convinced that mere political revolutions were not enough, then called itself _Communist_.
It was still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude communism. Yet,
it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of utopian communism — in France,
the Icarian communists of Cabet, and in Germany that of Weitling. Socialism in
1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on
the Continent at least, quite respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And
since we were very decidely of the opinion as early as then that the emancipation of
the workers must be the task of the working class itself, we could have no
hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor has it ever occured to us to
repudiate it.
Working men of all countries, unite! But few voices responded when we
proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the first Paris Revolution
in which the proletariat came out with the demands of its own. On September 28, 1864,
however, the proletarians of most of the Western European countries joined hands in the
International Working Men’s Association of glorious memory. True, the International itself
lived only nine years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries
created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than
this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is
reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as _one_ army,
under _one_ flag, for _one_ immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be
established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International
in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress of 1889. And today’s spectacle will open
the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the
proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!
FREDERICK ENGELS
May 1, 1890
London
NOTES ON THE MANIFESTO AND TRANSLATIONS OF IT
The Communist Manifesto was first published in February 1848 in London. It was
written by Marx and Engels for the Communist League, an organisation of German emigre
workers living in several western European countries. The translation above follows that
of the authorised English translation by Samuel Moore of 1888. In a few places, notably
the concluding line ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!, Hal Draper’s 1994 translation
has been followed, rather than Moore’s, which read ”Working men of all countries unite!’
For an exceptionally thorough account of the background of the Manifesto, the
history of different editions and translations, see Hal Draper The Adventures of the
Communist Manifesto Centre for Socialist History, Berkeley 1994.
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