Manifesto of the Communist Party

The Principles of Communism

*

 

In 1847 Engels wrote two draft programmes for the Communist League in the form of a catechism, 

one in June and the other in October. The latter, which is known as Principles of Communism, was 

first published in 1914. The earlier document “Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith”, was only 

found in 1968. It was first published in 1969 in Hamburg, together with four other documents 

pertaining to the first congress of the Communist League, in a booklet entitled Gründungs Dokumente 

des Bundes der Kommunisten (Juni bis September 1847) [Founding Documents of the Communist 

League]. 

At the June 1847 Congress of the League of the Just, which was also the founding conference of the 

Communist League, it was decided to issue a draft “confession of faith” to be submitted for discussion 

to the sections of the League. The document which has now come to light is almost certainly this 

draft. Comparison of the two documents shows that Principles of Communism is a revised edition of 

this earlier draft. In Principles of Communism, Engels left three questions unanswered, in two cases 

with the notation “unchanged” (bleibt); this clearly refers to the answers provided in the earlier draft. 

The new draft for the programme was worked out by Engels on the instructions of the leading body of 

the Paris circle of the Communist League. The instructions were decided on after Engels’ sharp 

criticism at the committee meeting, on October 22, 1847, of the draft programme drawn up by the 

“true socialist“ Moses Hess, which was then rejected. 

Still considering Principles of Communism as a preliminary draft, Engels expressed the view, in a 

letter to Marx dated November 23-24 1847, that it would be best to drop the old catechistic form and 

draw up a programme in the form of a manifesto.  

At the second congress of the Communist League (November 29-December 8, 1847) Marx and Engels 

defended the fundamental scientific principles of communism and were trusted with drafting a 

programme in the form of a manifesto of the Communist Party. In writing the manifesto the founders 

of Marxism made use of the propositions enunciated in Principles of Communism. 

Engels uses the term Manufaktur, and its derivatives, which have been translated “manufacture”, 

“manufacturing”, etc., Engels used this word literally, to indicate production by hand, not factory 

production for which Engels uses “big industry”. Manufaktur differs from handicraft (guild production 

in mediaeval towns), in that the latter was carried out by independent artisans. Manufacktur is carried 

out by homeworkers working for merchant capitalists, or by groups of craftspeople working together 

in large workshops owned by capitalists. It is therefore a transitional mode of production, between 

guild (handicraft) and modern (capitalist) forms of production. 

                                                      

*

 Written: October-November 1847; Source: Selected Works, Volume One, p. 81-97, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 

1969; first published: 1914, by Eduard Bernstein in the German Social Democratic Party’s Vorwärts!; translated: Paul 

Sweezy; Transcribed: Zodiac, MEA 1993; marxists.org 1999; proofed and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005. 

Footnotes are from the Chinese Edition of Marx/Engels Selected Works Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1977, with 

editorial additions by marxists.org. 

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42 

Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 

The Principles of Communism 

– 1 –  

What is Communism? 

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.  

– 2 –  

What is the proletariat? 

The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not 

draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole 

existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the 

vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the 

working class of the 19th century.

6

  

– 3 –  

Proletarians, then, have not always existed? 

No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been 

poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are 

today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always 

been free unbridled competitions.  

– 4 –  

How did the proletariat originate? 

The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last half 

of the last (18th) century, and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of 

the world.  

This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning 

machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines, 

which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole 

mode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaper 

and better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and 

handlooms. The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and 

rendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.). The result was 

that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This 

marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry.  

Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this 

system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, 

pottery, and the metal industries.  

Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who 

previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of 

labor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the 

individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed 

not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after 

another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and 

weaving had already done.  

But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were 

deprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture 

but also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly 

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