Manifesto of the Communist Party — trans. Samuel Moore, edited by Engels (1888)

Open to allKarl Marx and Friedrich Engels49 segments · 17 pp

The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.

page 17

The translator’s English as printed (Samuel Moore, edited by Engels). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

Commentary

page 17 ·

Cross-estate§001

Two books on this shelf, both in editions of 1888, each name one struggle as the key to history. The Manifesto makes it the struggle of classes. Papus's Traité élémentaire makes it the struggle of authority against power, and draws the opposite conclusion about secrecy: authority, persecuted by despots, wraps its teaching in mystery, and initiation is how truth survives. The Manifesto closes by refusing exactly that: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims." It opened the same way, setting a published manifesto against the tale of a spectre. Read side by side, they give two answers to whether a doctrine that expects to prevail should be taught in the open.

contrasts with Traité élémentaire de science occulte — Papus (Gérard Encausse) (1888)