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 anyone else, rests at Highgate 
Cemetery and over his grave the first grass is already growing. 
Since his death, there can even be less thought of revising or 
supplementing the Manifesto. All the more do I consider it 
necessary again to state here 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 primeval 
communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of 
class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, be- 
tween dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social 
development; 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 and 
class struggles—the basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to 
Marx.* 


* “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 


a See this volume, p. 517.— Ed. 


Preface to the Manifesto 119 


I have already stated this many times; but precisely now it is 
necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself. 


London, June 28, 1883 


F. Engels