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But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.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
© Verso 2012
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

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

eISBN: 978-1-84467-903-4

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset by M Rules
Printed in the US by Maple Vail

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. Whether Marx and Engels really considered a fuller ‘Umarbeitung oder Ergänzung’ of the Manifesto (Preface to German edition of 1883) may be doubted, but not that Marx’s death made such a rewriting impossible.

11 Compare the passage in Section II of the Manifesto (‘Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?’) with the corresponding passage in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.’).

12 Although this is the English version approved by Engels, it is not a strictly correct translation of the original text: ‘Mögen die herrschenden Klassen vor einer kommunistischen Revolution zittern. Die Proletarier haben nichts in ihr [‘in it’, i.e. ‘in the Revolution’; emphases added] zu verlieren als ihre Ketten.’

13 For a stylistic analysis, see S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Verso, New York 2011), pp. 148–9. The translations of the Manifesto known to me do not have the literary force of the original German text.

14 In ‘Die Lage Englands. Das 18. Jahrhundert’ (Marx–Engels Werke I, pp. 566–8).

15 See, for example, the discussion of ‘Fixed capital and the development of the productive resources of society’ in the 1857–58 manuscripts. Collected Works, vol. 29 (1987), pp. 80–99.

16 The German phrase ‘sich zur nationalen Klasse erheben’ had Hegelian connotations which the English translation authorized by Engels modified, presumably because he thought it would not be understood by readers in the 1880s.

17 Pauperism should not be read as a synonym for ‘poverty’.