Declaration

Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels

Declaration

["Neue Deutsche Zeitung" No. 158, 4 July 1850]

To the Editor of the Neue Deutsche Zeitung!

In the feuilleton of your newspaper of 22 June of this year, you accused me of advocating the
rule and the dictatorship of the working class, whereas,
in opposition to me, you assert the
abolition of class differences altogether.
I do not understand this correction.

You knew perfectly well that the Manifesto of the Communist Party (published
before the February Revolution of 1848) says on p. 16: “When the proletariat, in its struggle against the
bourgeoisie, necessarily unites as a class, makes itself the ruling class through a revolution, and, as the ruling class,
forcibly abolishes the old relations of production, then it thereby abolishes, together with these relations of production,
the conditions of existence of class antagonism, of classes altogether, and thereby its own rule as a class!”

You are aware that, in the
Poverty of Philosophy
<See Volume 4, pp.
181/82>, I defended the same view against Proudhon before February 1848.

Finally, in the essay itself which you criticise,
p. 32, No. 3 of the N. Rh. Zt.
, it states:
“This socialism” (i.e., communism)
“is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as
a necessary point of transition to the abolition of class differences altogether, to the
abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the
social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing
of all the ideas that arise from these social relations.”

K. Marx
, June 1850

In the feuilleton of your newspaper of 22 June, you most kindly
acknowledge that the suppression of the Neue Rhein. Zeitung left a
‘palpable gap’ in the German daily press, but you protest against “Herr Engels’s
assertion” that the Neue Rhein. Zeitung was the only organ
that had represented the proletariat not merely in phrase or in good will.

In my article on the German Reich constitution campaign,
No. 1 of the Neue Rhein Zeitung
, I did indeed declare
that the Neue Rhein. Zeitung was the only paper in which the German proletariat was
represented not merely in good will and phrase. Should you be of the opinion
that this assertion has done any damage to the Neue Deutsche Zeitung, the erstwhile official organ of the
Frankfurt extreme left, you will, without doubt, greatly oblige the
workers by demonstrating when, where and how the Neue Deutsche
Zeitung represented the German proletariat or its class interests.

London, 25 June 1850

F. Engels