From various quarters we have been reproached for neglecting to portray the economic conditions which form the material basis of the present struggles between classes and nations. With set purpose we have hitherto touched upon these conditions only when they forced themselves upon the surface of the political conflicts.

Above all, it was necessary to follow the development of the class struggle in the present history and to empirically prove by the historical material that was available and created every day, that with the subjugation of the working class, accomplished in the days of February and March, the opponents of that class -- the bourgeois republicans in France, and the bourgeois and peasant classes who were fighting feudal absolutism throughout the entire European continent -- were simultaneously conquered; that the victory of the "honest Republic" in France sounded at the same time the fall of the nations which had responded to the February revolution with heroic wars of independence; and finally that, by the defeat of the revolutionary workers, Europe fell back into its old double slavery, into the English-Russian slavery. The June conflict in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragicomedy in Berlin in November 1848, the desperate efforts of Poland, Italy, and Hungary, the starvation of Ireland into submission -- these were the chief events in which the European class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class was summed up, and from which we proved that every revolutionary uprising, however remote the goal of class struggle may seem, must fail, until the revolutionary working class is victorious, that every social reform must remain a utopia until the proletarian revolution and the feudalistic counter-revolution measure up with arms in world war. In our presentation, as in reality, Belgium and Switzerland were tragicomic caricature-like genre images in the great historic tableau; one the model state of the bourgeois Monarchy, the other the model state of the bourgeois Republic; both states, who imagine, they are just as independent of the class struggle as they are of the European revolution.^[1]

But now, after our readers have seen the class struggle of the year 1848 develop into colossal political proportions, it is time to examine more closely the economic conditions themselves upon which is founded the existence of the capitalist class and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the workers.

We shall present the subject in three great divisions:

1. The Relation of Wage-Labor to Capital, the Slavery of the Worker, the Rule of the Capitalist.
2. The Inevitable Ruin of the Middle Classes and the so-called Commons^[2] under the present system.
3. The Commercial Subjugation and Exploitation of the Bourgeois classes of the various European nations by the Despot of the World Market -- England.^[3]

We shall seek to portray this as simply and popularly as possible, and shall not presuppose a knowledge of even the most elementary notions of political economy. We wish to be understood by the workers. And, moreover, there prevails in Germany the most remarkable ignorance and confusion of ideas in regard to the simplest economic relations, from the patented defenders of existing conditions, down to the socialist wonder-workers and the misunderstood political geniuses, in whom the fragmented Germany is even richer than for territorial lords. We therefore proceed to the consideration of the first problem.

1. ↑ Translator's Note to 1891 edition: It must be remembered that this was written over 40 years ago. Today the class struggle in Switzerland, and especially Belgium, has reached that degree of development where it compels recognition from even the most superficial observers of political industrial life.
2. ↑ That is the "common" people as distinct from the "noble" and "clerical" (or "religious") people. Originating in feudal times in the rank of freeman and town-burgher the "commons" or "citizens" (burgher, burghers, citizen, citizens, or bourgeois) formed the starting-point of the bourgeoisie". - Ed.
3. ↑ As stated by Engels in the Introduction, the series of articles on "Wage-Labor and Capital" remained incomplete; the pamphlet is confined almost exclusively to a consideration of the first "great division": the relation of wage-labor to capital. - Ed.