Manifesto of the Communist Party

[Reprint of the 1882 Russian Edition]

At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: Manifest Kommunistyczny.

Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek,

Copenhagen, 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.

From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in El Socialista of Madrid, and

then reissued in pamphlet form: Manifesto del Partido Communista por Carlos Marx y F. Engels,

Madrid, Administracion de El Socialista, Hernan Cortes 8.

As a matter of curiosity, I may 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 American translations had been

repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version at last appeared in 1888. This was my friend

Samuel Moore, and we went through it together once more before it went to press. It is entitled:

Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorized English

translation, edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet

Street, 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 not at all numerous vanguard of scientific socialism (as is proved by the

translations mentioned in the first place), it was soon forced into the background by the reaction

that began with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally excommunicated

"by law" in 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 too passed into the background.

When the European workers 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