Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

BRUSSELS r 59

policies) and in tactics (in that Hess considered that the next revolution

should be a proletarian one). On behalf of the League's Paris branch

Engels produced a third draft of which he wrote to Marx just before they

left for London:

Think over the confession of faith a bit. I think it would be better to

drop the catechistic form and call the thing a communist manifesto. As

a certain amount of history will have to be brought in, I think the

present form is unsuitable. I am bringing along what I have done here.

It is in simple narrative form, but miserably edited and done in a

terrible hurry.^144

This draft, entitled 'Principles of Communism', a catechism of twenty-
five questions and answers, was drawn on quite extensively by Marx. In
places, however, there is a noticeable difference between the optimistic,
determinist approach of Engels which stemmed from the Enlightenment
and his experiences in industrial England, and the greater emphasis given
by Marx to politics in the light of experiences of the French working
class.^14 S Engels said later that it was 'essentially Marx's work"^46 and that
'the basic thought... belongs solely and exclusively to Marx'.^147 Notwith-
standing the appearance of their two names on the title page and the
persistent assumption about joint authorship, the actual writing of the
Communist Manifesto was done exclusively by Marx.
The Communist Manifesto has four sections. The first section gives a
history of society as class society since the Middle Ages and ends with
a prophecy of the victory of the proletariat over the present ruling class,
the bourgeoisie. The second section describes the position of communists
within the proletarian class, rejects bourgeois objections to communism
and then characterises the communist revolution, the measures to be
taken by the victorious proletariat and the nature of the future communist
society. The third section contains an extended criticism of other types
of socialism - reactionary, bourgeois and Utopian. The final section con-
tains a short description of communist tactics towards other opposition
parties and finishes with an appeal for proletarian unity.
The opening words typify Marx's approach to history:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster

and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant

opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,

now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary

reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contend-

ing classes.^148