The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels & Gareth Stedman Jones

Author:Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels & Gareth Stedman Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780140447576
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 2002-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

PART II

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

A Note on the Text

The text of the Manifesto reproduced here is Samuel Moore’s translation of the second German edition of 1872 for the first English edition of 1888. Moore, a barrister and manufacturer, was an old Manchester friend of Engels and his legal adviser. The translation was checked by Engels, who added explanatory footnotes. The translation was in places quite free, and occasionally misleading. Significant departures from the German original have been noted in the endnotes. An alternative translation has recently been made by Terrell Carver, who has also written about the arguments for and against the Moore/Engels version.1 Carver is right to point out that the spirit in which Moore and Engels approached the text in 1888 was quite different from that in which Marx had written the text forty years before. Nevertheless, no one has claimed that Moore produced a bad translation and it cannot be denied that Engels’ authorization bestows an additional authority upon that version. In the end, however, the best argument for retaining Moore’s translation is not that it is always the most faithful rendition of the German original, but that it was the form in which, for over a century, the Manifesto became familiar in the English-speaking world.

The punctuation and capitalization of the 1888 edition is preserved here.

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