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 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 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 class 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, roughhewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst 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 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 its 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 is built up, and from 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 distinctions 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 Condition of the Working Class in England. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it ready worked out, and put it before me, in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.

From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the following:

However much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever, Here and there some detail might be improved, The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of modern industry since 1 848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class; in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’. (See ‘The Civil War in France’, section III, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also, that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (section IV), although in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.

But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.

The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater portion of Marx’s Capital. We have revised it in common, and I have added a few notes explanatory of historical allusions.

London, 30 January 1888

This paperback edition first published by Verso 2012
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First published in hardback by Verso 1998
Introduction © Eric Hobsbawm 2012
Manifesto of the Communist Party first published in English 1848;
this translation first published 1888

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1  Only two items of such material have been discovered – a plan for Section III and one draft page. Karl Marx–Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6 (London 1976), pp. 576–7.

2  In the lifetime of the founders they were: (1) Preface to the (second) German edition, 1872; (2) Preface to the (second) Russian edition, 1882 – the first Russian translation, by Bakunin, had appeared in 1869, understandably without Marx’s and Engels’s blessing; (3) Preface to the (third) German edition, 1883; (4) Preface to the English edition, 1888; (5) Preface to the (fourth) German edition, 1890; (6) Preface to the Polish edition, 1892; and (7) Preface ‘To Italian Readers’, 1893.

3  Paolo Favilli, Storia del marxismo italiano. Dalle origini alla grande guerra (Milan 1996), pp. 252–4.

4  I rely on the figures in the invaluable Bert Andréas, Le Manifeste Communiste de Marx et Engels. Histoire et Bibliographie 1848–1918 (Milan 1963).

5  Data from the annual reports of the SPD Parteitage. However, no numerical data about theoretical publications are given for 1899 and 1900.

6  Robert R. LaMonte, ‘The New Intellectuals’, New Review II, 1914; cited in Paul Buhle, Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to the Present Day (London 1987), p. 56.

7  Hal Draper, The Annotated Communist Manifesto (Center for Socialist History, Berkeley, CA 1984), p. 64.

8  The original German begins this section by discussing ‘das Verhältniss der Kommunisten zu den bereits konstituierten Arbeiterparteien … also den Chartisten’, etc. The official English translation of 1887, revised by Engels, attenuates the contrast. A more faithful rendition would compare the ‘already constituted workers’ parties’ such as the Chartists, etc., with those not yet so constituted.

9  ‘The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties…. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement’ (Section II).

10 The best-known of these, underlined by Lenin, was the observation, in the 1872 preface, that the Paris Commune had shown ‘that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’. After Marx’s death Engels added the footnote modifying the first sentence of Section I to exclude prehistoric societies from the universal scope of class struggle. However, neither Marx nor Engels bothered to comment on or modify the economic passages of the document.