The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole working class of Europe and America owes more than to anyone else, rests at Highgate Cemetery and over his grave the first grass is already growing. Since his death, there can even be less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. All the more do I consider it necessary again to state here 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 primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; 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 and class struggles — the basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.(1)
I have already stated this many times; but precisely now it is necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.
London, June 28, 1883
F. Engels
1883 edition
Endnotes
[66] This Preface to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 477-519) was written for the third German authorised edition, the first to appear after Marx's death. It was published in English for the first time in Marx K. and Engels F., Manifesto of the Communist Party, Modern Books, London, 1929.