The “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was written by Marx and Engels as the Communist
League’s programme on the instruction of its Second Congress (London, November 29-December 8,
1847), which signified a victory for the followers of a new proletarian line during the discussion of the programme questions.
When Congress was still in preparation, Marx and Engels arrived at the conclusion that the final programme document should be in the form of a Party manifesto (see Engels’ letter to Marx of
November 23-24, 1847). The catechism form usual for the secret societies of the time and retained in the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” and “Principles of Communism,” was not suitable for a full and substantial exposition of the new revolutionary
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After
Engels’ departure for Paris at the end of December and up to his return on January 31, Marx worked on the Manifesto alone.
Hurried by the Central Authority of the Communist League which provided him with certain documents (e.g., addresses of the People’s Chamber (Halle) of the League of the Just of November
1846 and February 1847, and, apparently, documents of the First Congress of the Communist League pertaining to the discussion of the Party programme), Marx worked intensively on the Manifesto through almost the whole of January 1848. At the end of January the manuscript was sent on to
London to be printed in the German Workers’ Educational Society’s print shop owned by a German emigrant J. E. Burghard, a member of the Communist League.
The manuscript of the Manifesto has not survived. The only extant materials written in Marx’s hand are a draft plan for Section III, showing his efforts to improve the structure of the Manifesto, and a page of a rough
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The text took up 30 pages, some misprints of the first edition were corrected, and the punctuation improved. Subsequently this text was used by Marx and Engels as a basis for later authorised editions. Between March and July 1848 the Manifesto was printed in the
Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, a democratic newspaper of the German emigrants. Already that same year numerous efforts were made to publish the Manifesto in other European languages. A Danish, a
Polish (in Paris) and a Swedish (under a different title: “The Voice of Communism. Declaration of the
Communist Party”) editions appeared in 1848. The translations into French, Italian and Spanish made at that time remained unpublished. In April 1848, Engels, then in Barmen, was translating the
Manifesto into English, but he managed to translate only half of it, and the first English translation, made by Helen Macfarlane, was not published until two years later, between June and November 1850, in the Chartist journal The Red Republican. Its editor, Julian Harney, named the authors for the first time in the introduction to this publication. All earlier and many subsequent editions of the Manifesto
were