CommunistManifesto

By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Authorized English TranslationEdited and Annotated by Frederick Engels

Published Online bySocialist Labor Party of America

www.slp.org

November 2006

Communist Manifesto

By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

PUBLISHING HISTORY(Record of earlier New York Labor News editions lost)

As Manifesto of the Communist Party

FIRST PRINTING ....................................................... May 1928

SECOND PRINTING ........................................... February 1933

THIRD PRINTING ............................................. November 1933

FOURTH PRINTING ......................................... December 1934

FIFTH PRINTING .................................................... March 1939

SIXTH PRINTING ................................................... August 1945

SEVENTH PRINTING ........................................... October 1947

As Communist Manifesto

CENTENNIAL EDITION ......................................... March 1948

SECOND PRINTING ............................................... August 1949

THIRD PRINTING ................................................. October 1954

FOURTH PRINTING ............................................. October 1959

FIFTH PRINTING .................................................... March 1961

SIXTH PRINTING ....................................................... May 1964

SEVENTH PRINTING ....................................... November 1968

ONLINE EDITION ............................................. November 2006

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FREDERICK ENGELS PREFACE TO 1888 ENGLISH EDITION.

The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, aworking-mens association, first exclusively German, later on international, and,under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secretsociety. At a Congress of the League, held in November, 1847, Marx and Engelswere commissioned to prepare for publication a complete theoretical and practicalparty-programme. Drawn up in German, in January, 1848, the manuscript was sentto the printer in London a few weeks before the French revolution of February24th.1 A French translation was brought out in Paris, shortly before theinsurrection of June, 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane,appeared in George Julian Harneys Red Republican, London, 1850. A Danish anda Polish edition had also been published.

The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June, 1848the first great battlebetween Proletariat and Bourgeoisiedrove again into the background, for a time,the social and political aspirations of the European working-class. Thenceforth, thestruggle for supremacy was, again, as it had been before the revolution of February,solely between different sections of the propertied class; the working class wasreduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of theMiddle-class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued toshow signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian policehunted out the Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne.The members were arrested, and, after eighteen months imprisonment, they weretried in October, 1852. This celebrated Cologne Communist trial lasted fromOctober 4th till November 12th; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms ofimprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately after thesentence, the League was formally dissolved by the remaining members. As to theManifesto, it seemed henceforth to be doomed to oblivion.

When the European working-class had recovered sufficient strength for anotherattack on the ruling classes, the International Working Mens Association sprang

1 [In February, 1848, a revolt of the lower tier of the capitalist classthe industrial

bourgeoisieagainst the aristocracy of finance, in turn, dethroned the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe (also known as the July Monarchy from the month in which it came to power in 1830.)NOTE: bracketed footnotes are by the publisher; all others are by Frederick Engels.]

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up. But this association, formed with the express aim of welding into one body thewhole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could not at once proclaim theprinciples laid down in the Manifesto. The International was bound to have aprogramme broad enough to be acceptable to the English Trades Unions, to thefollowers of Proudhon2 in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans(a) in Germany. Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of allparties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working-class, whichwas sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very eventsand vicissitudes of the struggle against Capital, the defeats even more than thevictories, could not help bringing home to mens minds the insufficiency of theirvarious favourite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight intothe true conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. TheInternational, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men fromwhat it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germanywere dying out, and even the Conservative English Trades Unions, though most ofthem had long since severed their connexion with the International, were graduallyadvancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their President couldsay in their name Continental Socialism has lost its terror for us. In fact: theprinciples of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the workingmen of all countries.

The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. The German text had been,since 1850, reprinted several times in Switzerland, England and America. In 1872,it was translated into English in New York, where the translation was published inWoodhull and Claflins Weekly. From this English version, a French one wasmade in Le Socialiste of New York. Since then at least two more Englishtranslations, more or less mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one ofthem has been reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made byBakounine, was published at Herzens Kolokol office in Geneva, about 1863; asecond one, by the heroic Vera Zasulitch, also in Geneva, 1882. A new Danishedition is to be found in Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh

2 [Pierre Joseph Proudhon (180365). A theoretician of the petty bourgeoisie and of anarchism,

whose ideas had an especially wide influence on the French workers.](a) Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such,

stood on the ground of the Manifesto. But in his first public agitation, 186264, he did not gobeyond demanding co-operative workshops supported by State credit. [Ferdinand Lassalle(18251864). The founder of the reformist German labor movement.]

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French translation in Le Socialiste, Paris, 1886. From this latter a Spanishversion was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are notto be counted, there have been twelve altogether at the least. An Armeniantranslation, which was to be published in Constantinople some months ago, did notsee the light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a book withthe 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 them.Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects, to a great extent, the history of themodern working-class movement; at present it is doubtless the most wide-spread,the most international production of all Socialist Literature, the common platformacknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.

Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. BySocialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the variousUtopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them alreadyreduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand,the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed toredress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances[;] inboth cases men outside the working class movement, and looking rather to theeducated classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had becomeconvinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed thenecessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself Communist. It wasa crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still, it touched thecardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce theUtopian Communism of Cabet in France, and in Germany, of Weitling. Thus,Socialism was, in 1847, a middle-class movement, Communism a working-classmovement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, respectable; Communismwas the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that theemancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, therecould 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 t