The Project Gutenberg EBook of Manifesto of the Communist Party, by
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

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Title: Manifesto of the Communist Party

Author: Karl Marx
Frederick Engels

Editor: Frederick Engels

Release Date: February 5, 2010 [EBook #31193]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY ***

Produced by Al Haines, from images obtained from The Internet Archive.

Manifesto

Of the

Communist

Party

By

KARL MARX

and

FREDERICK ENGELS

AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Edited and Annotated by Frederick Engels

_Price 10 Cents_

NEW YORK

Published by the New York Labor News Co., 28 City Hall Place

1908

PREFACE

The "Manifesto" was published as the platform of the "Communist
League," a workingmen'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 London in November, 1847, Marx and Engels were
commissioned to prepare for publication 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
the 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 m