Principles of Communism
Grundsätze des Kommunismus
Engels’s draft programme for the Communist League, written in Paris in October–November 1847 as a catechism of 25 questions and answers, and the direct forerunner of the Communist Manifesto: the industrial revolution and the rise of the proletariat, crises, the abolition of private property, a twelve-point programme of transitional measures, the end of the division of labour and of the opposition of town and country, the family, and the Communists’ attitude to other parties.
- Edition
- Translated by Max Bedacht as “Principles of Communism (Engels’ Original Draft of the Communist Manifesto)”, Little Red Library No. 3 (Daily Worker Publishing Co., Chicago, 1925), with Bedacht’s introduction, afterword and notes. Obvious misprints corrected; words lost from the 1925 printing are restored in ⟨angle brackets⟩.
- Source
- Internet Archive (1925 Daily Worker edition)
Start reading 1 h 1 min audiobook
Quiz
Test your reading. The short quiz draws 11 questions at random from 36; score 80% for a silver medal. The full quiz asks all 36; a perfect score earns gold.
Contents
- Translator’s Introduction (Max Bedacht, 1925) 11 min 6
Max Bedacht, a leader of the American Workers (Communist) Party, introduces his 1925 translation: the misery of pre-1848 Germany, the quarrelsome circles of German émigrés in Brussels, Paris and London, the League of Communists and its need for a programme, Moses Hess’s rejected “Confession of Faith,” and Engels’s letters to Marx about writing a new draft and abandoning the catechism form. He presents the Principles as Engels’s draft for the Communist Manifesto, published for the first time in English, and explains the gaps in the manuscript and his own notes.
- Principles of Communism 48 min 44
Engels’s draft programme of 1847, in 25 questions and answers. Communism is the science of the conditions of the proletariat’s emancipation. The industrial revolution created two classes, bourgeois and proletarians; the proletarian sells his labour for the minimum needed to live and differs from slave, serf and manufacturing worker. Industry has unified the world market, put the bourgeoisie in power, and produced periodic crises that show private property has become a fetter on production. The remedy is its abolition and the planned direction of production by society — possible only now, preferably peaceful, and gradual. The revolution will establish a democratic constitution and carry out twelve measures, from progressive taxation to national education and communal settlements; it will be international, and will end classes, the division of labour, the opposition of town and country, and the economic basis of marriage. The last questions survey the various socialists and the Communists’ alliances with democratic parties in each country.
- Translator’s Afterword (Max Bedacht, 1925) 2 min 3
Bedacht’s afterword and the introduction to his notes: the document belongs to the eve of 1848, and its timetables were too optimistic, but its sketch of social development and its insistence on an independent proletarian revolution, with the bourgeois revolution only as a first act, remain valuable.