The Communist Manifesto

Preface to The 1883 German Edition

The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the wholeworking class of Europe and America owes more than to any one else – rests at HighgateCemetery and over his grave the first grass is already growing. Since his death [March 14, 1883],there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But I consider it all themore necessary again to state the following expressly:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto – that economic production, and the structure ofsociety of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for thepolitical and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of theprimaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, ofstruggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at variousstages of social evolution; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where theexploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the classwhich exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing thewhole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles – this basic thought belongs solelyand exclusively to Marx.* 

I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary that it also stand in frontof the Manifesto itself.

Frederick Engels 

June 28, 1883, London   

* "This proposition," I wrote in the preface to the English translation, "which, in my opinion, is destined to do forhistory what Darwin' s theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for some yearsbefore 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by my Conditions of the Working Classin England. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before mein terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here." [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890] 

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