Since the above 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: 

“The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist 
Party, in Bakunin’s translation, was published in the early sixties‘ 
by the printing office of the Kolokol.”’ At that time the significance 
to the West of the Russian translation of this work was at most 
that of a literary curiosity. Such a view would no longer be 
possible today. What a limited field the proletarian movement still 
occupied at that time (January 1848°) is best shown by the last 
chapter of the Manifesto: “Position of the Communists in Relation to 
the Various Opposition Parties.” © The most notable omissions here 
are Russia and the United States. It was the time when Russia 
constituted the last great reserve of European reaction and when 

emigration to the United States absorbed the surplus forces of the 
European proletariat. Both countries supplied Europe with raw 
materials and at the same time provided markets for the sale of its 
manufactured goods. Thus both served, each in its own way, as 
pillars of the European social order. 

‘How all that has changed today! It is that self-same European 
emigration which has made possible the immense development of 
North American agriculture which, through its competition, is 
shaking the very foundations of European landed property —large 
and small. It has also enabled the United States to make a start on 
exploiting its tremendous industrial resources, and with such 
energy and on such a scale that this is bound in a short while to 
put an end to the industrial monopoly of Western Europe.* And 
these two circumstances react in revolutionary manner also on 
America itself. The small and medium landed property of the 
self-employed” farmers, the foundation of America’s entire 
political system, is increasingly succumbing to competition from 
giant farms, whilst simultaneously in the industrial regions a 
numerically strong proletariat is taking shape for the first time 
alongside a fabulous concentration of capitals. 

“Let us move on to Russia. During the revolution of 1848-49 
not only the European monarchs, but also the European 
bourgeois, saw in Russian intervention their sole salvation from a 
European proletariat just awakening to its own power. They 
proclaimed the Tsar‘ head of European reaction. Today he‘ 
languishes in Gatchina, a prisoner of war of the revolution, and 
Russia forms the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in 
Europe. 

“It was the task of the Communist Manifesto to proclaim the 
inevitably impending demise of contemporary bourgeois property. 
But in Russia we find that, alongside the capitalist system, 
developing with a feverish haste, and bourgeois landed property, 
only just beginning to develop, more than half the land is the 
common property of the peasants. 

‘Now the question is: can the Russian peasant community, a 

form of the primeval common ownership of land, albeit greatly 
eroded, pass directly to the higher, communist form of common 
ownership, or must it first pass through the same process of 
dissolution as demonstrated in the historical development of the 
West? 

“The only answer possible to this question today is the 
following. If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a 
proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement 
each other, then present-day Russian common ownership may 
serve as a Starting point for communist development. 

“London, January 21, 1882.” 

At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in 
Geneva: Manifest Komunistyczny? 

Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the 
Socialdemokratisk Bibliotek, K@benhavn, 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.‘ 

After this a Spanish version was published the same year, first in 
El Socialista* of Madrid, and then reissued in pamphlet form: 
Manifesto del Partido Comunista por Carlos Marx y F. Engels, 
Madrid, Administraci6n de El Socialista, Hernan Cortés 8. 

As a matter of curiosity I may also 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 

19-22, June 11-August 6, 1886.— Ed. 

American translations had been repeatedly reprinted in England,’ 
an authentic version at last appeared in 1888. This was by my 
friend Samuel Moore, and we went through it together once more 
before it was sent to press. It is entitled: Manifesto of the Communist 
Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorised English 
Translation, edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, 
London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet St., 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 then still not at 
all numerous vanguard of scientific Socialism (as is proved by the 
translations mentioned in the first preface‘), it was soon forced 
into the background by the reactionary developments that 
originated with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and 
was finally excommunicated “according to law” by 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 
passed into the background. 

When the working class of Europe 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 
Trave Unions, the French, Belgian, Italian and Spanish Proudhon- 
ists and the German Lassalleans.* This programme—the preamble 
to the Rules of the International‘—was drawn up by Marx with a 

* Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a “disciple” of 
Marx, and, as such, stood, of course, on the ground of the Manifesto. Matters were 
quite different with regard to those of his followers who did not go beyond his 
demand for producers’ co-operatives supported by state credits and who divided 

the whole working class into supporters of state assistance and supporters of 
self-assistance. 

master hand acknowledged even by Bakunin and the anarchists. 
For the ultimate triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto 
Marx relied solely and exlusively upon the intellectual develop- 
ment of the working class, as it necessarily had 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 hitherto 
of their universal panaceas and make their minds more receptive 
to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for the 
emancipation of the workers. 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 then arch-conservative 
English Trape 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 terrors 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 al] kinds of 
patchwork, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both 
cases, people who stood outside the labour 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” Com- 
munism 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 act of the working 
class itself’ ,°? we could have no hesitation as to which of the two 
names we should choose. Nor has it ever occurred to us since to 
repudiate it. 

“Working men of all countries, unite!” But few voices re- 
sponded when we proclaimed these words to the world forty-two 
years ago, on the eve of the first Paris revolution in which the 
proletariat came out with 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 today, as I write these lines, the European and American 
proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilised for the first 
time, mobilised 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 in 
1889.*' And today’s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists 
and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the working 
men of all countries are united indeed. 

If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes! 

London, May 1, 1890 
F. Engels