Manifesto of the Communist Party

Preface to The 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 [a reference to the Free 

Russian Printing House]. 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

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, 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 primeval 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 

  

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Preface to The 1883 German Edition  

The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole 

working class of Europe and America owes more than to any one else – rests at Highgate 

Cemetery and over his grave the first grass is already growing. Since his death [March 14, 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 solely 

and exclusively to Marx.

*

  

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  

 

                                                      

*

 “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.” [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890]  

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