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. I (Collected Works, vol. 35, 1996), p. 750.

27 Lichtheim, Marxism, pp. 58–60.

1  Clemens Lothar, Prince Metternich, was the leading Austrian statesman from 1809 to 1848 and the architect of the counter-revolutionary Holy Alliance.

2  François Guizot was a French historian and de facto Prime Minister from 1840 to 1848 under the Orleanist ‘July’ monarchy of Louis Philippe.

3  By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live [Engels].

4  That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or to have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in: Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) [Engels].

5  Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild [Engels].

6  ‘Commune’ was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even before they had conquered, from their feudal lords and masters, local self-government and political rights as the ‘third estate’. Generally speaking, for the economic development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France [Engels].

7  In Marx’s later theory of surplus value, he concluded that it is the wor labour power, not his labour, that is sold to the capitalist as a commodity. See ‘Wages, Prices and Profit’, in Marx Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence & Wishart (London 1968).

8  In 1846. See Engels’s article ‘The English Ten Hours Bill’, Marx–Engels, Articles on Britain, Progress Publishers (Moscow 1971), pp.