Manifesto of the Communist Party

In the autumn of 1847 a small international society of emigre artisans, meeting in London under the name of the Communist League, asked two young Germans to write down what the League believed. The elder was twenty-nine, the younger twenty-seven. The finished text reached the printer only weeks before the revolutions of February 1848 broke across the continent, and was published in German, anonymously, as a pamphlet of twenty-three pages. Almost nobody read it. The risings of 1848 were made and defeated without it; for two decades it survived as what the 1882 preface printed here calls, with some bitterness, "a literary curiosity".

The first section, "Bourgeois and Proletarians", is a description of capitalism written while capitalism was still young, and it has dated less than descriptions written yesterday. Marx and Engels grasped that the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary class - that it "cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production", and that in doing so it tears up every settled relation: "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." They saw that this revolutionising could not stay within borders: "The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country" - a sentence that reads today less like prophecy than like the morning news. And they saw the sting in it: that the same process which builds a world market builds the class that will end it, so that what the bourgeoisie "produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers".

The English here is not a Soviet translation. It is the standard one - Samuel Moore's of 1888, which Engels edited and annotated five years after Marx's death. What Moscow supplied around it, in Volume One of the Progress Publishers Selected Works, is the apparatus: six of the seven prefaces the authors wrote for later editions, in which they correct their own text as events overtook it, together with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's endnotes.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.