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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

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Title: Manifesto of the Communist Party

Author: Karl Marx
Frederick Engels

Editor: Frederick Engels

Release Date: February 5, 2010 [EBook #31193]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY ***




Produced by Al Haines, from images obtained from The Internet Archive.









Manifesto

Of the

Communist

Party


By

KARL MARX

and

FREDERICK ENGELS



AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION


Edited and Annotated by Frederick Engels




_Price 10 Cents_




NEW YORK

Published by the New York Labor News Co., 28 City Hall Place

1908




PREFACE

The "Manifesto" was published as the platform of the "Communist
League," a workingmen'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 London in November, 1847, Marx and Engels were
commissioned to prepare for publication 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
the 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
thenceforth to be doomed to oblivion.

When the European working class had recovered sufficient strength for
another attack on the ruling classes, the International Workingmen'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 Trades' Unions, to the followers
of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy and Spain, and to the
Lassalleans(a) 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 of 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 of working-class
emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking
up in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it had found
them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were
dying out, and even the conservative English Trades' 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 terrors for us." In fact, the
principles of the "Manifesto" had made considerable headway among the
workingmen of all countries.

The Manifesto itself thus came 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 in "Woodhull 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
Bakounine, was published at Herzen's "Kolokol" office in Geneva, about
1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulitch, also in Geneva, 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 have not seen them. Thus the history of the Manifesto
reflects, to a great extent, the history of the modern working class
movement; at present it is undoubtedly the most widespread, the most
international production of all Socialist Literature, the common
platform acknowledged by millions of workingmen 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 manners 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 classes had become convinced of the
insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the
necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself
Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of
Communism; still it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough
among the working class to produce the Utopian Communism, in France of
Cabet, and in Germany of Weitling. Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, 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 working class must be the act of...