i wrotre it while i was at my mom s house because i couldnt find any penciils at atmy dad's house

i cant seee the haiku so her eit is

Manifesto of the Communist Party
by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
February 1848
Written: Late 1847;
First Published: February 1848;
Source: Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, pp. 98-137;
Translated: Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, 1888;
Transcribed: by Zodiac and Brian Baggins;
Proofed: and corrected against 1888 English Edition by Andy Blunden 2004;
Copyleft: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1987, 2000, 2010. Permission is granted to
distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License.
Table of Contents
Editorial Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 2
Preface to The 1872 German Edition .............................................................................................. 4
Preface to The 1882 Russian Edition .............................................................................................. 5
Preface to The 1883 German Edition .............................................................................................. 6
Preface to The 1888 English Edition............................................................................................... 7
Preface to The 1890 German Edition ............................................................................................ 10
Preface to The 1892 Polish Edition............................................................................................... 12
Preface to The 1893 Italian Edition............................................................................................... 13
Manifesto of the Communist Party................................................................................................ 14
I. Bourgeois and Proletarians ........................................................................................................ 14
II. Proletarians and Communists ................................................................................................... 22
III. Socialist and Communist Literature ........................................................................................ 28
1. Reactionary Socialism....................................................................................................... 28
A. Feudal Socialism ...................................................................................................... 28
B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism ....................................................................................... 29
C. German or “True” Socialism.................................................................................... 29
2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism ............................................................................... 31
3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism.................................................................... 32
IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties ............. 34
Letter from Engels to Marx, 24 November 1847 .......................................................................... 35
Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith ................................................................................... 36
The Principles of Communism...................................................................................................... 41
Demands of the Communist Party in Germany............................................................................. 55
The Paris Commune. Address to the International Workingmen’s Association, May 1871......... 58
Endnotes ........................................................................................................................................ 67
2 Introduction
Editorial Introduction
The “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was written by Marx and Engels as the Communist
League’s programme on the instruction of its Second Congress (London, November 29-December 8,
1847), which signified a victory for the followers of a new proletarian line during the discussion of the
programme questions.
When Congress was still in preparation, Marx and Engels arrived at the conclusion that the final
programme document should be in the form of a Party manifesto (see Engels’ letter to Marx of
November 23-24, 1847). The catechism form usual for the secret societies of the time and retained in
the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” and “Principles of Communism,” was not suitable for
a full and substantial exposition of the new revolutionary world outlook, for a comprehensive
formulation of the proletarian movement’s aims and tasks. See also “Demands of the Communist
Party in Germany,” issued by Marx soon after publication of the Manifesto, which addressed the
immediate demands of the movement.
Marx and Engels began working together on the Manifesto while they were still in London
immediately after the congress, and continued until about December 13 when Marx returned to
Brussels; they resumed their work four days later (December 17) when Engels arrived there. After
Engels’ departure for Paris at the end of December and up to his return on January 31, Marx worked
on the Manifesto alone.
Hurried by the Central Authority of the Communist League which provided him with certain
documents (e.g., addresses of the People’s Chamber (Halle) of the League of the Just of November
1846 and February 1847, and, apparently, documents of the First Congress of the Communist League
pertaining to the discussion of the Party programme), Marx worked intensively on the Manifesto
through almost the whole of January 1848. At the end of January the manuscript was sent on to
London to be printed in the German Workers’ Educational Society’s print shop owned by a German
emigrant J. E. Burghard, a member of the Communist League.
The manuscript of the Manifesto has not survived. The only extant materials written in Marx’s hand
are a draft plan for Section III, showing his efforts to improve the structure of the Manifesto, and a
page of a rough copy.
The Manifesto came off the press at the end of February 1848. On February 29, the Educational
Society decided to cover all the printing expenses.
The first edition of the Manifesto was a 23-page pamphlet in a dark green cover. In April-May 1848
another edition was put out. The text took up 30 pages, some misprints of the first edition were
corrected, and the punctuation improved. Subsequently this text was used by Marx and Engels as a
basis for later authorised editions. Between March and July 1848 the Manifesto was printed in the
Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, a democratic newspaper of the German emigrants. Already that same
year numerous efforts were made to publish the Manifesto in other European languages. A Danish, a
Polish (in Paris) and a Swedish (under a different title: “The Voice of Communism. Declaration of the
Communist Party”) editions appeared in 1848. The translations into French, Italian and Spanish made
at that time remained unpublished. In April 1848, Engels, then in Barmen, was translating the
Manifesto into English, but he managed to translate only half of it, and the first English translation,
made by Helen Macfarlane, was not published until two years later, between June and November 1850,
in the Chartist journal The Red Republican. Its editor, Julian Harney, named the authors for the first
time in the introduction to this publication. All earlier and many subsequent editions of the Manifesto
were anonymous.
The growing emancipation struggle of the proletariat in the ’60s and ’70s of the 19th century led to
new editions of the Manifesto. The year 1872 saw a new German edition with minor corrections and a
preface by Marx and Engels where they drew some conclusions from the experience of the Paris
3 Introduction
Commune of 1871. This and subsequent German editions (1883 and 1890) were entitled the
Communist Manifesto. In 1872 the Manifesto was first published in America in Woodhull & Claflin’s
Weekly.
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto, translated by Mikhail Bakunin with some distortions,
appeared in Geneva in 1869. The faults of this edition were removed in the 1882 edition (translation
by Georgi Plekhanov), for which Marx and Engels, who attributed great significance to the
dissemination of Marxism in Russia, had written a special preface.
After Marx’s death, the Manifesto ran into several editions. Engels read through them all, wrote
prefaces for the 1883 German edition and for the 1888 English edition in Samuel Moore’s translation,
which he also edited and supplied with notes. This edition served as a basis for many subsequent
editions of the Manifesto in English – in Britain, the United States and the USSR. In 1890, Engels
prepared a further German edition, wrote a new preface to it, and added a number of notes. In 1885,
the newspaper Le Socialiste published the French translation of the Manifesto made by Marx’s
daughter Laura Lafargue and read by Engels. He also wrote prefaces to the 1892 Polish and 1893
Italian editions.
This edition includes the two earlier versions of the Manifesto, namely the draft “Communist
Confession of Faith” and “The Principles of Communism,” both authored by Engels, as well as the
letter from Engels to Marx which poses the idea of publishing a “manifesto,” rather than a catechism.
The Manifesto addressed itself to a mass movement with historical significance, not a political sect.
On the other hand, the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” is included to place the
publication of the Manifesto in the context of the mass movement in Germany at the time, whose
immediate demands are reflected by Marx in this pamphlet. Clearly the aims of the Manifesto were
more far-reaching the movement in Germany at the time, and unlike the “Demands,” was intended to
outlive the immediate conditions.
The “Third Address to the International Workingmen’s Association” is included because in this
speech Marx examines the movement of the working class manifested in the Paris Commune, and his
observations here mark the only revisions to his social and historical vision made during his lifetime
as a result of the development of the working class movement itself, clarifying some points and
making others more concrete.
Preface to The 1872 German Edition
The Communist League, an international association of workers, which could of course be only a
secret one, under conditions obtaining at the time, commissioned us, the undersigned, at the
Congress held in London in November 1847, to write for publication a detailed theoretical and
practical programme for the Party. Such was the origin of the following Manifesto, the
manuscript of which travelled to London to be printed a few weeks before the February [French]
Revolution [in 1848]. First published in German, it has been republished in that language in at
least twelve different editions in Germany, England, and America. It was published in English for
the first time in 1850 in the Red Republican, London, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and
in 1871 in at least three different translations in America. The French version first appeared in
Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848, and recently in Le Socialiste of New York. A
new translation is in the course of preparation. A Polish version appeared in London shortly after
it was first published in Germany. A Russian translation was published in Geneva in the sixties1
.
Into Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its appearance.
However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general
principles laid down in the 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 1848, 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 been
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: Address of the General Council of the International Working
Men’s Association, 1871, 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. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with an introduction bridging the gap from 1847
to the present day; but this reprint was too unexpected to leave us time for that.
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels
June 24, 1872, London

Preface to The 1882 Russian Edition
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was
published early in the ‘sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol [a reference to the Free
Russian Printing House]. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto)
only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December 1847) is most
clearly shown by the last section: the position of the Communists in relation to the various
opposition parties in various countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It
was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the
United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through immigration. Both
countries provided Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of
its industrial products. Both were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing
European system.
How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North American for a gigantic
agricultural production, whose competition is shaking the very foundations of European landed
property – large and small. At the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its
tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the
industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now. Both
circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself. Step by step, the small and
middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing
to the competition of giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous
concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the industrial regions.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the
European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning to
awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today,
he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina 2
, and Russia forms the vanguard of
revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending
dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly
flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the
land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though
greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the
higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the
same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a
proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian
common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels
January 21, 1882, London

Preface to The 1883 German Edition
The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole
working class of Europe and America owes more than to any one else – rests at Highgate
Cemetery and over his grave the first grass is already growing. Since his death [March 14, 1883],
there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But I consider it all the
more necessary again to state the following expressly:
The basic thought running through the Manifesto – that economic production, and the structure of
society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for the
political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the
primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of
struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various
stages of social evolution; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the
exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class
which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the
whole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles – this basic thought belongs solely
and exclusively to Marx.*

I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary that it also stand in front
of the Manifesto itself.
Frederick Engels
June 28, 1883, London

*
“This proposition,” I wrote in the preface to the English translation, “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 Conditions of the Working Class
in England. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me
in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.” [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890]
Preface to The 1888 English Edition
The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working men’ 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
November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare 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 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 henceforth doomed to oblivion.
When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling
classes, the International Working Men’ 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 trade unions, to the
followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans 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 in 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 for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its
breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found them in 1864.
Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative
English trade 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 [W. Bevan] could say in their name: “Continental socialism has lost its terror for us.” In
fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of
all countries.

* Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of
the Manifesto. But in his first public agitation, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond demanding co-operative workshops
supported by state credit.
8 Preface to the 1888 English Edition
The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since 1850, the German text had been reprinted
several times in Switzerland, England, and America. In 1872, it was translated into English in
New York, where the translation was published in Woorhull 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 Bakunin, was
published at Herzen’ s Kolokol office in Geneva, about 1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera
Zasulich, also in Geneva, in 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 had not seen. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern workingclass movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide spread, 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 manner 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 total social
change, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of
communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working
class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany. Thus,
in 1847, socialism was 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 workers 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 the 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 it is built up, and from that
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 distinction, 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 “Conditions of the
Working Class in England.” But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it
9 Preface to the 1888 English Edition
already 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 that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five
years, the general principles laid down in the 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 1848, 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 been antiquated. One thing especially was proved
by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of readymade state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil War in
France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’ s
Association 1871, 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.
Frederick Engels
January 30, 1888, London

Preface to The 1890 German Edition
Since [the first German preface of 1883] was written, a new German edition of the Manifesto has
again become necessary, and much has also happened to the Manifesto which should be recorded
here.
A second Russian translation – by Vera Zasulich – appeared in Geneva in 1882; the preface to
that edition was written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately, the original German manuscript has
gone astray; I must therefore retranslate from the Russian which will in no way improve the text.
It reads:
[Reprint of the 1882 Russian Edition ]
At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: Manifest Kommunistyczny.
Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek,
Copenhagen, 1885. Unfortunately, it is not quite complete; certain essential passages, which seem
to have presented difficulties to the translator, have been omitted, and, in addition, there are signs
of carelessness here and there, which are all the more unpleasantly conspicuous since the
translation indicates that had the translator taken a little more pains, he would have done an
excellent piece of work.
A new French version appeared in 1886, in Le Socialiste of Paris; it is the best published to date.
From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in El Socialista of Madrid, and
then reissued in pamphlet form: Manifesto del Partido Communista por Carlos Marx y F. Engels,
Madrid, Administracion de El Socialista, Hernan Cortes 8.
As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the manuscript of an Armenian translation
was offered to a publisher in Constantinople. But the good man did not have the courage to
publish something bearing the name of Marx and suggested that the translator set down his own
name as author, which the latter however declined.
After one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate American translations had been
repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version at last appeared in 1888. This was my friend
Samuel Moore, and we went through it together once more before it went to press. It is entitled:
Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorized English
translation, edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet
Street, E.C. I have added some of the notes of that edition to the present one.
The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with enthusiasm, at the time of its
appearance, by the not at all numerous vanguard of scientific socialism (as is proved by the
translations mentioned in the first place), it was soon forced into the background by the reaction
that began with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally excommunicated
“by law” in the conviction of the Cologne Communists in November 1852. With the
disappearance from the public scene of the workers’ movement that had begun with the February
Revolution, the Manifesto too passed into the background.
When the European workers had again gathered sufficient strength for a new onslaught upon the
power of the ruling classes, the International Working Men’ s Association came into being. Its
aim was to weld together into one huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and
America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles laid down in the Manifesto. It was
bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on the English trade unions, the
French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish Proudhonists, and the German Lassalleans. This programme
– the considerations underlying the Statutes of the International – was drawn up by Marx with a
master hand acknowledged even by the Bakunin and the anarchists. For the ultimate final triumph
11 Preface to the 1890 German Edition
of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon the intellectual development of the
working class, as it necessarily has to ensue from united action and discussion. The events and
vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the successes, could not but
demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy of their former universal panaceas, and make their
minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for working-class
emancipation. And Marx was right. The working class of 1874, at the dissolution of the
International, was altogether different from that of 1864, at its foundation. Proudhonism in the
Latin countries, and the specific Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out; and even the ten
arch-conservative English trade unions were gradually approaching the point where, in 1887, the
chairman of their Swansea Congress could say in their name: “Continental socialism has lost its
terror for us.” Yet by 1887 continental socialism was almost exclusively the theory heralded in
the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent, the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the
modern working-class movement since 1848. At present, it is doubtless the most widely
circulated, the most international product of all socialist literature, the common programme of
many millions of workers of all countries from Siberia to California.
Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. In 1847, two
kinds of people were considered socialists. On the one hand were the adherents of the various
utopian systems, notably the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at
that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out. On the other, the manifold
types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social abuses through their various universal
panaceas and all kinds of patch-work, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases,
people who stood outside the labor movement and who looked for support rather to the
“educated” classes. The section of the working class, however, which demanded a radical
reconstruction of society, convinced that mere political revolutions were not enough, then called
itself Communist. It was still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude
communism. Yet, it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of utopian communism
– in France, the “Icarian” communists of Cabet, and in Germany that of Weitling. Socialism in
1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was,
on the Continent at least, quite respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And
since we were very decidedly of the opinion as early as then that “the emancipation of the
workers must be the task of the working class itself,” [from the General Rules of the
International] we could have no hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor
has it ever occurred to us to repudiate it.
“Working men of all countries, unite!” But few voices responded when we proclaimed these
words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the first Paris Revolution in which the proletariat
came out with the demands of its own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of most
of the Western European countries joined hands in the International Working Men’ s Association
of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived only nine years. But that the eternal union
of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is
no better witness than this day. Because today3
, as I write these lines, the European and American
proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army,
under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by
legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by
the Paris Workers’ Congress of 1889. And today’ s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists
and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united
indeed.
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!
Frederick Engels
May 1, 1890, London

Preface to The 1892 Polish Edition
The fact that a new Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto has become necessary gives rise
to various thoughts.
First of all, it is noteworthy that of late the Manifesto has become an index, as it were, of the
development of large-scale industry on the European continent. In proportion as large-scale
industry expands in a given country, the demand grows among the workers of that country for
enlightenment regarding their position as the working class in relation to the possessing classes,
the socialist movement spreads among them and the demand for the Manifesto increases. Thus,
not only the state of the labour movement but also the degree of development of large-scale
industry can be measured with fair accuracy in every country by the number of copies of the
Manifesto circulated in the language of that country.
Accordingly, the new Polish edition indicates a decided progress of Polish industry. And there
can be no doubt whatever that this progress since the previous edition published ten years ago has
actually taken place. Russian Poland, Congress Poland, has become the big industrial region of
the Russian Empire. Whereas Russian large-scale industry is scattered sporadically – a part round
the Gulf of Finland, another in the centre (Moscow and Vladimir), a third along the coasts of the
Black and Azov seas, and still others elsewhere – Polish industry has been packed into a
relatively small area and enjoys both the advantages and disadvantages arising from such
concentration. The competing Russian manufacturers acknowledged the advantages when they
demanded protective tariffs against Poland, in spit of their ardent desire to transform the Poles
into Russians. The disadvantages – for the Polish manufacturers and the Russian government –
are manifest in the rapid spread of socialist ideas among the Polish workers and in the growing
demand for the Manifesto.
But the rapid development of Polish industry, outstripping that of Russia, is in its turn a new
proof of the inexhaustible vitality of the Polish people and a new guarantee of its impending
national restoration. And the restoration of an independent and strong Poland is a matter which
concerns not only the Poles but all of us. A sincere international collaboration of the European
nations is possible only if each of these nations is fully autonomous in its own house. The
Revolution of 1848, which under the banner of the proletariat, after all, merely let the proletarian
fighters do the work of the bourgeoisie, also secured the independence of Italy, Germany and
Hungary through its testamentary executors, Louis Bonaparte and Bismarck; but Poland, which
since 1792 had done more for the Revolution than all these three together, was left to its own
resources when it succumbed in 1863 to a tenfold greater Russian force. The nobility could
neither maintain nor regain Polish independence; today, to the bourgeoisie, this independence is,
to say the last, immaterial. Nevertheless, it is a necessity for the harmonious collaboration of the
European nations. It can be gained only by the young Polish proletariat, and in its hands it is
secure. For the workers of all the rest of Europe need the independence of Poland just as much as
the Polish workers themselves.
F. Engels
London, February 10, 1892
Preface to The 1893 Italian Edition
Publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party coincided, one may say, with March 18,
1848, the day of the revolution in Milan and Berlin, which were armed uprisings of the two
nations situated in the centre, the one, of the continent of Europe, the other, of the Mediterranean;
two nations until then enfeebled by division and internal strife, and thus fallen under foreign
domination. While Italy was subject to the Emperor of Austria, Germany underwent the yoke, not
less effective though more indirect, of the Tsar of all the Russias. The consequences of March 18,
1848, freed both Italy and Germany from this disgrace; if from 1848 to 1871 these two great
nations were reconstituted and somehow again put on their own, it was as Karl Marx used to say,
because the men who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were, nevertheless, its testamentary
executors in spite of themselves.
Everywhere that revolution was the work of the working class; it was the latter that built the
barricades and paid with its lifeblood. Only the Paris workers, in overthrowing the government,
had the very definite intention of overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But conscious though they
were of the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither
the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the mass of French
workers had as yet reached the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In
the final analysis, therefore, the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class. In the
other countries, in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, the workers, from the very outset, did nothing
but raise the bourgeoisie to power. But in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible
without national independence Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the
unity and autonomy of the nations that had lacked them up to then: Italy, Germany, Hungary.
Poland will follow in turn.
Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved the way, prepared the
ground for the latter. Through the impetus given to large-scaled industry in all countries, the
bourgeois regime during the last forty-five years has everywhere created a numerous,
concentrated and powerful proletariat. It has thus raised, to use the language of the Manifesto, its
own grave-diggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to
achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of
these nations toward common aims. Just imagine joint international action by the Italian,
Hungarian, German, Polish and Russian workers under the political conditions preceding 1848!
The battles fought in 1848 were thus not fought in vain. Nor have the forty-five years separating
us from that revolutionary epoch passed to no purpose. The fruits are ripening, and all I wish is
that the publication of this Italian translation may augur as well for the victory of the Italian
proletariat as the publication of the original did for the international revolution.
The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism in the past. The first
capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern
capitalist era are marked by a colossal figured: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle
Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching.
Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?
Frederick Engels
London, February 1, 1893
Manifesto of the Communist Party
A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have
entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in
power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism,
against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a
power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world,
publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the
Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the
following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish
languages.
I. Bourgeois and Proletarians*
The history of all hitherto existing society†
is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡
and journeyman, in a
word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society
into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians,
knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,
apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done
away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,
new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

*
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, 1888 English edition]
†
That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded
history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in
Russia, Georg Ludwig von 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 organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by
Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With
the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic
classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second
edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]
‡
Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]
15 Manifesto of the Communist Party
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has
simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great
hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these
burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising
bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the
colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce,
to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds,
now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system
took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class;
division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour
in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer
sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by
industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the
way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to
communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry;
and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion
the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class
handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of
development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political
advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and
self-governing association in the medieval commune*
: here independent urban republic (as in
Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the
period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the
bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market,
conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive
of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal,
idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his
“natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious

*
This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or
conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition] “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 economical development of
the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888
English Edition]
16 Manifesto of the Communist Party
fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In
one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with
reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science,
into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family
relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle
Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful
indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished
wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has
conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,
and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first
condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire
surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions
everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character
to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has
drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established
national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new
industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by
industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the
remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter
of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old
local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal
inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual
creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local
literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely
facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.
The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese
walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It
compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels
them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
17 Manifesto of the Communist Party
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities,
has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a
considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country
dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the
civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of
the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means
of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this
was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate
interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation,
with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one
customs-tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more
colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s
forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation,
railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers,
whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that
such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built
itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means
of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and
exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the
feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive
forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution
adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its
relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic
means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the
powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the
history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces
against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for
the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that
by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time
more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the
previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out
an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears
as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of
subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much
civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the
conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these
conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring
disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The
conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how
does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of
productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough
exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more
destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
18 Manifesto of the Communist Party
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against
the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called
into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the
proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the
proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as
they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers,
who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and
are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the
market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He
becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and
most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is
restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for
the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to
its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the
wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour
increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also inc...