Manifesto of the Communist Party

Preface to The 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 celebrated 

“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 formally 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.

*

 

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 [W. Bevan] 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.  

                                                      

*

 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, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond demanding co-operative workshops 

supported by state credit.  

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8 

Preface to the 1888 English Edition 

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, more 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, the 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 

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