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’. The German words, borrowed from English usage, are ‘Pauper’ (‘a destitute person … one supported by charity or by some public provision’: Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary) and ‘Pauperismus’ (pauperism: ‘state of being a pauper’: ibid.).

18 Paradoxically, something like the Marxian argument of 1848 is widely used today by capitalists and free-market governments to prove that the economies of states whose GNP continues to double every few decades will be bankrupted if they do not abolish the systems of income transfer (welfare states, etc.), installed in poorer times, by which those who earn maintain those who are unable to earn.

19 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 1, The Founders (Oxford 1978), p. 130.

20 George Lichtheim, Marxism (London 1964), p. 45.

21 Collected Works, vol. 3 (1975), pp. 186–7. In this passage I have generally preferred the translation in Lichtheim, Marxism. The German word translated by him as ‘class’ is ‘Stand’, which is misleading today.

22 Published as Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy in 1844 (Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 418–43).

23 ‘On the History of the Communist League’ (Collected Works, vol. 26, 1990), p. 318.

24 ‘Outlines of a Critique’ (Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 433 ff). This seems to have been derived from radical British writers, notably John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes (London 1835), to whom Engels refers in this connection.

25 This is even clearer from Engels’s formulations in what are, in effect, two preliminary drafts of the Manifesto, ‘Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith’ (Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 102) and ‘Principles of Communism’ (ibid., p. 350).

26 From ‘Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’, in Capital, vol.