Manifesto of the Communist Party

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