Preface to The 1893
Italian Edition
Publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party coincided, one may say, with March 18,
1848, the day of the revolution in Milan and Berlin, which were armed uprisings of the two
nations situated in the centre, the one, of the continent of Europe, the other, of the Mediterranean;
two nations until then enfeebled by division and internal strife, and thus fallen under foreign
domination. While Italy was subject to the Emperor of Austria, Germany underwent the yoke, not
less effective though more indirect, of the Tsar of all the Russias. The consequences of March 18,
1848, freed both Italy and Germany from this disgrace; if from 1848 to 1871 these two great
nations were reconstituted and somehow again put on their own, it was as Karl Marx used to say,
because the men who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were, nevertheless, its testamentary
executors in spite of themselves.
Everywhere that revolution was the work of the working class; it was the latter that built the
barricades and paid with its lifeblood. Only the Paris workers, in overthrowing the government,
had the very definite intention of overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But conscious though they
were of the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither
the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the mass of French
workers had as yet reached the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In
the final analysis, therefore, the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class. In the
other countries, in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, the workers, from the very outset, did nothing
but raise the bourgeoisie to power. But in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible
without national independence Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the
unity and autonomy of the nations that had lacked them up to then: Italy, Germany, Hungary.
Poland will follow in turn.
Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved the way, prepared the
ground for the latter. Through the impetus given to large-scaled industry in all countries, the
bourgeois regime during the last forty-five years has everywhere created a numerous,
concentrated and powerful proletariat. It has thus raised, to use the language of the Manifesto, its
own grave-diggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to
achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of
these nations toward common aims. Just imagine joint international action by the Italian,
Hungarian, German, Polish and Russian workers under the political conditions preceding 1848!
The battles fought in 1848 were thus not fought in vain. Nor have the forty-five years separating
us from that revolutionary epoch passed to no purpose. The fruits are ripening, and all I wish is
that the publication of this Italian translation may augur as well for the victory of the Italian
proletariat as the publication of the original did for the international revolution.
The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism in the past. The first
capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern
capitalist era are marked by a colossal figured: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle
Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching.
Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?
Frederick Engels
London, February 1, 1893
Manifesto of the Communist Party
A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have
entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in
power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism,
against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a
power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world,
publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the
Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the
following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish
languages.
I. Bourgeois and Proletarians
*
The history of all hitherto existing society
†
is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
‡
and journeyman, in a
word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society
into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians,
knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,
apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done
away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,
new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
*
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of
wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are
reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
†
That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded
history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in
Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history,
and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from
India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by
Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With
the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic
classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second
edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]
‡
Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]