inctive sort of
Communism; still it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough
among the working class to produce the Utopian Communism, in France of
Cabet, and in Germany of Weitling. Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, a
middle class movement, Communism a working class movement. Socialism
was, on the Continent at least, "respectable"; Communism was the very
opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning was, that "the
emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class
itself," there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must
take. Moreover, we have ever since been far from repudiating it.

The "Manifesto" being our joint production, I consider myself bound to
state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs
to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the
prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social
organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which
is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and
intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history
of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding
land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles,
contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed
classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of
evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the
exploited and the oppressed class--the proletariat--cannot attain its
emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class--the
bourgeoisie--without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating
society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions
and class struggles.

This proposition, 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 toward it, is best shown by my "Condition of
the Working Class in England."(b) But when I again met Marx at
Brussels in the spring of 1845, he had it ready worked out, and put it
before me, in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it
here.

From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the
following:

"However much the state of things may have altered during the last
twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this