The later of two stereotyped reprints both designated as the ‘Fifth Edition’ of the first Authorised English Translation of the Communist Manifesto. The publisher, William Reeves, produced stereotype plates from pages 3-31 the original 1888 edition and frequently reprinted the text thereafter.
The present example is the seventh edition produced by Reeves in chronological order and is distinguishable from the earlier so-called ‘Fifth Edition’, dated by Andréas as circa 1908-1912, by various factors, including: the price is increased from ‘Twopence’ to ‘Threepence’; the addition of a general notice at the head of the advertisements page noting that ‘Most of the advertised prices of 1s. are increased now to 1s. 6d. net.’; and, finally, the present example is printed on noticeably cheaper wood pulp paper stock, leading to Andréas speculating that it was printed circa 1918 when Britain introduced paper rationing at the end of the First World War.
“[One of the outstanding political documents of all time” (PMM), the first ‘Authorised English Translation’ of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, remaining to date the primary source for all English translations. Edited and annotated by Engels, who also undertook significant portions of the translation work, and as such the only translation of the Manifesto ever produced with full editorial control by either Marx or Engels, the “translation which is undoubtedly the most important one of all, because of Engels’ special relation to it” (Draper, Adventures of the Communist, p. 78). Engels would also provide the single most important, and most extensive, preface to any edition of the Manifesto, containing one of the most commonly referenced definitions of historical materialism.
Written on behalf of the League of Communists, having been commissioned at their Second Congress in December 1847, the Manifesto appeared for the first time in a German language edition published in London, February 1848. In 1850, the first English translation was published across four successive issues of George Julian Harney’s weekly newspaper The Red Republican, an organ of the English Chartists, translated by the Scottish Chartist feminist and philosopher Helen Macfarlane (1818-1860). Macfarlane’s “defective” (op cit., p. 31) translation, with the iconic opening line “A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism” eccentrically rendered “A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe”, would serve as the principle basis of English translations of the Manifesto up until the publication of the ‘Authorised’ version presented here.
Following a silence of over twenty years, the Macfarlane version resurfaced in New York, reprinted virtually in whole in the December 30, 1871 issue of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, although without crediting Macfarlane as translator. “Interestingly enough, Marx and Engels did not recognise the translation as the one published in 1850. In a letter Engels was derogatory about ‘Woodhull’s English’. Though the translation left much to be desired, he wrote, ‘we have to make use of [it] for propaganda for the time being’” (op cit., p. 48). In New York, 1883 and in London, 1886, the Macfarlane version, via the Woodhull reprint, would serve as the basis of two heavily bowdlerised separate printings, the work of émigré German anarchist Johann Most, “mainly known today for the notoriety he gained as a rhetorician of anarchism in America” (op cit., p. 68). With deliberate omissions and significant garbling, including the entire deletion of the ten-point program in Section II, the text was accompanied by anonymous annotations “imposing Most’s anarchising line on the Manifesto” (op cit., p. 69).
The need for an ‘Authorised’ English translation was, therefore, clear. Not only had previous English translations, all variants of the defective Macfarlane version, been subject to mistreatment and bowdlerisation, any form of English translation had also remained largely unobtainable over the forty years since its first publication. For the ‘Authorised’ version, Engels himself undertook the role of translator with the assistance of Samuel Moore, who had already collaborated with Engels on the English translation of Marx’s Kapital. Moore’s task was to provide a close translation, following the original as literally as possible, which would serve as a first draft for Engels. “The real translator, then, must be taken to be Engels, using Moore’s draft as a first approximation”, deliberately revising and rewriting the “formulation of many a sentence in order to adapt the Manifesto for the workers of a nation other than the one it was originally written for”, as well as adding eight substantial explanatory footnotes (op cit., p. 105f). Moreover, the significance of Engels’ original editorial contributions is underscored by the previous refusal by both Marx and Engels to revise or update the Manifesto in any way, insisting on its status as a “historical document”. And yet, “here was Engels doing a kind of limited revision or updating the language” (op cit., p. 106). It is, therefore, the “sole version of the Manifesto for which Engels was 100 percent responsible, hence a document of independent authority” (op cit., p. 80).
PMM, 326 (first edition); Andréas, 495.
