By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Preface to the German edition of 1883
The preface to the present edition I must, alas,
sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole working class class of Europe
and America owes more than to any one else - rests at Highgate
cemetery and over his grave the first first grass is already growing.
Since his death, there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing
the Manifesto. But I consider it all the more necessary again
to state the following expressly:
The basic thought running through the Manifesto
- that economic production and the structure of society of every historical
epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the
political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently
(ever since the dissolution of the primaeval communal ownership of land)
all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between
exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at
various stages of social evolution; that this struggle, however, has
now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat)
can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses
it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole
of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles - this basic
thought belongs soley and exclusively to Marx. [1]
I have already stated this many times; but precisely
now is it necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto
itself.
FREDERICK ENGELS
London, 28 June 1883.
Note:
[1] "This proposition,"
I wrote in the preface to the English translation, "which, in my
opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done
for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some
years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it
is best shown by my Conditions of the Working Class in England.
But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring, 1845, he had it already
worked out and put it before me, in terms almost as clear as those in
which I have stated it here."
Go on to the Preface
to the 1888 edition.
Go on to Chapter One of the Manifesto.
Return to the front page of the
Manifesto.
