The Manifesto of the Communist Party.
Written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Introduction:
A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter
of communism.
All the powers of old Europe have entered
into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter:
Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French
Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has
not been decried as communistic by its opponents
in power?
Where is the opposition that has not hurled
back the branding reproach of communism, against
the more advanced opposition parties, as well
as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
One: Communism is already acknowledged by
all European powers to be itself a power.
Two: It is high time that Communists should
openly, in the face of the whole world, publish
their views, their aims, their tendencies,
and meet this nursery tale of the Specter
of Communism with a manifesto of the party
itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities
have assembled in London and sketched the
following manifesto, to be published in the
English, French, German, Italian, Flemish
and Danish languages.
Chapter One: Bourgeois and Proletarians.
The history of all hitherto existing society
is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian,
lord and serf, guild-master 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 contending
classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find
almost everywhere a complicated arrangement
of society into various orders, a manifold
gradation of social rank.
In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights,
plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal
lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,
apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these
classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted
from the ruins of feudal society has not done
away with class antagonisms.
It has but established new classes, new conditions
of oppression, new forms of struggle in place
of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses,
however, this distinct feature: it has simplified
class antagonisms.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting
up into two great hostile camps, into two
great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie
and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the
chartered burghers of the earliest towns.
From these burgesses the first elements of
the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of
the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising
bourgeoisie.
The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation
of America, trade with the colonies, the increase
in the means of exchange and in commodities
generally, gave to commerce, to navigation,
to industry, an impulse never before known,
and thereby, to the revolutionary element
in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial
production was monopolised by closed guilds,
now no longer sufficed for the growing wants
of the new markets.
The manufacturing system took its place.
The guild-masters were pushed on one side
by the manufacturing middle class; division
of labour between the different corporate
guilds vanished in the face of division of
labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the
demand ever rising.
Even manufacturer no longer sufficed.
Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised
industrial production.
The place of manufacture was taken by the
giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial
middle class by industrial millionaires, the
leaders of the whole industrial armies, the
modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world
market, for which the discovery of America
paved the way.
This market has given an immense development
to commerce, to navigation, to communication
by land.
This development has, in its turn, reacted
on the extension of industry; and in proportion
as industry, commerce, navigation, railways
extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie
developed, increased its capital, and pushed
into the background every class handed down
from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie
is itself the product of a long course of
development, of a series of revolutions in
the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie
was accompanied by a corresponding political
advance of that class.
An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal
nobility, an armed and self-governing association
in the medieval commune: here independent
urban republic (as in Italy and Germany);
there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy
(as in France); afterwards, in the period
of manufacturing proper, serving either the
semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in
fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies
in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since
the establishment of Modern Industry and of
the world market, conquered for itself, in
the modern representative State, exclusive
political sway.
The executive of the modern state is but a
committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played
a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper
hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal,
idyllic relations.
It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley
feudal ties that bound man to his “natural
superiors”, and has left remaining no other
nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,
than callous “cash payment”.
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies
of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm,
of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water
of egotistical calculation.
It has resolved personal worth into exchange
value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible
chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom — Free Trade.
In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious
and political illusions, it has substituted
naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every
occupation hitherto honoured and looked up
to with reverent awe.
It has converted the physician, the lawyer,
the priest, the poet, the man of science,
into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family
its sentimental veil, and has reduced the
family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came
to pass that the brutal display of vigour
in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so
much admire, found its fitting complement
in the most slothful indolence.
It has been the first to show what man’s
activity can bring about.
It has accomplished wonders far surpassing
Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic
cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that
put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations
and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly
revolutionising the instruments of production,
and thereby the relations of production, and
with them the whole relations of society.
Conservation of the old modes of production
in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the
first condition of existence for all earlier
industrial classes.
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the
bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices
and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed
ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air, all that
is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled
to face with sober senses his real conditions
of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market
for its products chases the bourgeoisie over
the entire surface of the globe.
It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation
of the world market given a cosmopolitan character
to production and consumption in every country.
To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has
drawn from under the feet of industry the
national ground on which it stood.
All old-established national industries have
been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.
They are dislodged by new industries, whose
introduction becomes a life and death question
for all civilised nations, by industries that
no longer work up indigenous raw material,
but raw material drawn from the remotest zones;
industries whose products are consumed, not
only at home, but in every quarter of the
globe.
In place of the old wants, satisfied by the
production of the country, we find new wants,
requiring for their satisfaction the products
of distant lands and climes.
In place of the old local and national seclusion
and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse
in every direction, universal inter-dependence
of nations.
And as in material, so also in intellectual
production.
The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property.
National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness
become more and more impossible, and from
the numerous national and local literatures,
there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement
of all instruments of production, by the immensely
facilitated means of communication, draws
all, even the most barbarian, nations into
civilisation.
The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy
artillery with which it batters down all Chinese
walls, with which it forces the barbarians’
intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to
capitulate.
It compels all nations, on pain of extinction,
to adopt the bourgeois mode of production;
it compels them to introduce what it calls
civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become
bourgeois themselves.
In one word, it creates a world after its
own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country
to the rule of the towns.
It has created enormous cities, has greatly
increased the urban population as compared
with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable
part of the population from the idiocy of
rural life.
Just as it has made the country dependent
on the towns, so it has made barbarian and
semi-barbarian countries dependent on the
civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations
of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing
away with the scattered state of the population,
of the means of production, and of property.
It has agglomerated population, centralised
the means of production, and has concentrated
property in a few hands.
The necessary consequence of this was political
centralisation.
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces,
with separate interests, laws, governments,
and systems of taxation, became lumped together
into one nation, with one government, one
code of laws, one national class-interest,
one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce
one hundred years, has created more massive
and more colossal productive forces than have
all preceding generations together.
Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery,
application of chemistry to industry and agriculture,
steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs,
clearing of whole continents for cultivation,
canalisation of rivers, whole populations
conjured out of the ground — what earlier
century had even a presentiment that such
productive forces slumbered in the lap of
social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of
exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie
built itself up, were generated in feudal
society.
At a certain stage in the development of these
means of production and of exchange, the conditions
under which feudal society produced and exchanged,
the feudal organisation of agriculture and
manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal
relations of property became no longer compatible
with the already developed productive forces;
they became so many fetters.
They had to be burst asunder; they were burst
asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition,
accompanied by a social and political constitution
adapted in it, and the economic and political
sway of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our
own eyes.
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations
of production, of exchange and of property,
a society that has conjured up such gigantic
means of production and of exchange, is like
the sorcerer who is no longer able to control
the powers of the nether world whom he has
called up by his spells.
For many a decade past the history of industry
and commerce is but the history of the revolt
of modern productive forces against modern
conditions of production, against the property
relations that are the conditions for the
existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.
It is enough to mention the commercial crises
that by their periodical return put the existence
of the entire bourgeois society on its trial,
each time more threateningly.
In these crises, a great part not only of
the existing products, but also of the previously
created productive forces, are periodically
destroyed.
In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic
that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed
an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into
a state of momentary barbarism; it appears
as if a famine, a universal war of devastation,
had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence;
industry and commerce seem to be destroyed;
and why?
Because there is too much civilisation, too
much means of subsistence, too much industry,
too much commerce.
The productive forces at the disposal of society
no longer tend to further the development
of the conditions of bourgeois property; on
the contrary, they have become too powerful
for these conditions, by which they are fettered,
and so soon as they overcome these fetters,
they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois
society, endanger the existence of bourgeois
property.
The conditions of bourgeois society are too
narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.
And how does the bourgeoisie get over these
crises?
On the one hand by enforced destruction of
a mass of productive forces; on the other,
by the conquest of new markets, and by the
more thorough exploitation of the old ones.
That is to say, by paving the way for more
extensive and more destructive crises, and
by diminishing the means whereby crises are
prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled
feudalism to the ground are now turned against
the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the
weapons that bring death to itself; it has
also called into existence the men who are
to wield those weapons — the modern working
class — the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital,
is developed, in the same proportion is the
proletariat, the modern working class, developed
— a class of labourers, who live only so
long as they find work, and who find work
only so long as their labour increases capital.
These labourers, who must sell themselves
piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other
article of commerce, and are consequently
exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition,
to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and
to the division of labour, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character,
and, consequently, all charm for the workman.
He becomes an appendage of the machine, and
it is only the most simple, most monotonous,
and most easily acquired knack, that is required
of him.
Hence, the cost of production of a workman
is restricted, almost entirely, to the means
of subsistence that he requires for maintenance,
and for the propagation of his race.
But the price of a commodity, and therefore
also of labour, is equal to its cost of production.
In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness
of the work increases, the wage decreases.
Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery
and division of labour increases, in the same
proportion the burden of toil also increases,
whether by prolongation of the working hours,
by the increase of the work exacted in a given
time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop
of the patriarchal master into the great factory
of the industrial capitalist.
Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory,
are organised like soldiers.
As privates of the industrial army they are
placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy
of officers and sergeants.
Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois
class, and of the bourgeois State; they are
daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,
by the overlooker, and, above all, by the
individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.
The more openly this despotism proclaims gain
to be its end and aim, the more petty, the
more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength
implied in manual labour, in other words,
the more modern industry becomes developed,
the more is the labour of men superseded by
that of women.
Differences of age and sex have no longer
any distinctive social validity for the working
class.
All are instruments of labour, more or less
expensive to use, according to their age and
sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer
by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that
he receives his wages in cash, than he is
set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie,
the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker,
etc.
The lower strata of the middle class — the
small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired
tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and
peasants — all these sink gradually into
the proletariat, partly because their diminutive
capital does not suffice for the scale on
which Modern Industry is carried on, and is
swamped in the competition with the large
capitalists, partly because their specialised
skill is rendered worthless by new methods
of production.
Thus the proletariat is recruited from all
classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages
of development.
With its birth begins its struggle with the
bourgeoisie.
At first the contest is carried on by individual
labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory,
then by the operative of one trade, in one
locality, against the individual bourgeois
who directly exploits them.
They direct their attacks not against the
bourgeois conditions of production, but against
the instruments of production themselves;
they destroy imported wares that compete with
their labour, they smash to pieces machinery,
they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore
by force the vanished status of the workman
of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the labourers still form an
incoherent mass scattered over the whole country,
and broken up by their mutual competition.
If anywhere they unite to form more compact
bodies, this is not yet the consequence of
their own active union, but of the union of
the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to
attain its own political ends, is compelled
to set the whole proletariat in motion, and
is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so.
At this stage, therefore, the proletarians
do not fight their enemies, but the enemies
of their enemies, the remnants of absolute
monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial
bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.
Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated
in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory
so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the
proletariat not only increases in number;
it becomes concentrated in greater masses,
its strength grows, and it feels that strength
more.
The various interests and conditions of life
within the ranks of the proletariat are more
and more equalised, in proportion as machinery
obliterates all distinctions of labour, and
nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same
low level.
The growing competition among the bourgeois,
and the resulting commercial crises, make
the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating.
The increasing improvement of machinery, ever
more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood
more and more precarious; the collisions between
individual workmen and individual bourgeois
take more and more the character of collisions
between two classes.
Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations
(Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois;
they club together in order to keep up the
rate of wages; they found permanent associations
in order to make provision beforehand for
these occasional revolts.
Here and there, the contest breaks out into
riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but
only for a time.
The real fruit of their battles lies, not
in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding
union of the workers.
This union is helped on by the improved means
of communication that are created by modern
industry, and that place the workers of different
localities in contact with one another.
It was just this contact that was needed to
centralise the numerous local struggles, all
of the same character, into one national struggle
between classes.
But every class struggle is a political struggle.
And that union, to attain which the burghers
of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways,
required centuries, the modern proletarian,
thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into
a class, and, consequently into a political
party, is continually being upset again by
the competition between the workers themselves.
But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer,
mightier.
It compels legislative recognition of particular
interests of the workers, by taking advantage
of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself.
Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was
carried.
Altogether collisions between the classes
of the old society further, in many ways,
the course of development of the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a
constant battle.
At first with the aristocracy; later on, with
those portions of the bourgeoisie itself,
whose interests have become antagonistic to
the progress of industry; at all time with
the bourgeoisie of foreign countries.
In all these battles, it sees itself compelled
to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help,
and thus, to drag it into the political arena.
The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies
the proletariat with its own elements of political
and general education, in other words, it
furnishes the proletariat with weapons for
fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections
of the ruling class are, by the advance of
industry, precipitated into the proletariat,
or are at least threatened in their conditions
of existence.
These also supply the proletariat with fresh
elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle
nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution
going on within the ruling class, in fact
within the whole range of old society, assumes
such a violent, glaring character, that a
small section of the ruling class cuts itself
adrift, and joins the revolutionary class,
the class that holds the future in its hands.
Just as, therefore, at an earlier period,
a section of the nobility went over to the
bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie
goes over to the proletariat, and in particular,
a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who
have raised themselves to the level of comprehending
theoretically the historical movement as a
whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face
with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat
alone is a really revolutionary class.
The other classes decay and finally disappear
in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat
is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer,
the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant,
all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to
save from extinction their existence as fractions
of the middle class.
They are therefore not revolutionary, but
conservative.
Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try
to roll back the wheel of history.
If by chance, they are revolutionary, they
are only so in view of their impending transfer
into the proletariat; they thus defend not
their present, but their future interests,
they desert their own standpoint to place
themselves at that of the proletariat.
The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat]
the social scum, that passively rotting mass
thrown off by the lowest layers of the old
society, may, here and there, be swept into
the movement by a proletarian revolution;
its conditions of life, however, prepare it
far more for the part of a bribed tool of
reactionary intrigue.
In the condition of the proletariat, those
of old society at large are already virtually
swamped.
The proletarian is without property; his relation
to his wife and children has no longer anything
in common with the bourgeois family relations;
modern industry labour, modern subjection
to capital, the same in England as in France,
in America as in Germany, has stripped him
of every trace of national character.
Law, morality, religion, are to him so many
bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in
ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper
hand sought to fortify their already acquired
status by subjecting society at large to their
conditions of appropriation.
The proletarians cannot become masters of
the productive forces of society, except by
abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation,
and thereby also every other previous mode
of appropriation.
They have nothing of their own to secure and
to fortify; their mission is to destroy all
previous securities for, and insurances of,
individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements
of minorities, or in the interest of minorities.
The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority,
in the interest of the immense majority.
The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our
present society, cannot stir, cannot raise
itself up, without the whole superincumbent
strata of official society being sprung into
the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the
struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie
is at first a national struggle.
The proletariat of each country must, of course,
first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the
development of the proletariat, we traced
the more or less veiled civil war, raging
within existing society, up to the point where
that war breaks out into open revolution,
and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie
lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based,
as we have already seen, on the antagonism
of oppressing and oppressed classes.
But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions
must be assured to it under which it can,
at least, continue its slavish existence.
The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised
himself to membership in the commune, just
as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of
the feudal absolutism, managed to develop
into a bourgeois.
The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead
of rising with the process of industry, sinks
deeper and deeper below the conditions of
existence of his own class.
He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops
more rapidly than population and wealth.
And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie
is unfit any longer to be the ruling class
in society, and to impose its conditions of
existence upon society as an over-riding law.
It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent
to assure an existence to its slave within
his slavery, because it cannot help letting
him sink into such a state, that it has to
feed him, instead of being fed by him.
Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie,
in other words, its existence is no longer
compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence
and for the sway of the bourgeois class is
the formation and augmentation of capital;
the condition for capital is wage-labour.
Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition
between the labourers.
The advance of industry, whose involuntary
promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the
isolation of the labourers, due to competition,
by the revolutionary combination, due to association.
The development of Modern Industry, therefore,
cuts from under its feet the very foundation
on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
products.
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above
all, are its own grave-diggers.
Its fall and the victory of the proletariat
are equally inevitable.
Chapter 2.
Proletarians and Communists.
In what relation do the Communists stand to
the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party
opposed to the other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart
from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles
of their own, by which to shape and mould
the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the
other working-class parties by this only:
1.
In the national struggles of the proletarians
of the different countries, they point out
and bring to the front the common interests
of the entire proletariat, independently of
all nationality.
2.
In the various stages of development which
the struggle of the working class against
the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they
always and everywhere represent the interests
of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one
hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute
section of the working-class parties of every
country, that section which pushes forward
all others; on the other hand, theoretically,
they have over the great mass of the proletariat
the advantage of clearly understanding the
line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate
general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the
same as that of all other proletarian parties:
formation of the proletariat into a class,
overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest
of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists
are in no way based on ideas or principles
that have been invented, or discovered, by
this or that would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual
relations springing from an existing class
struggle, from a historical movement going
on under our very eyes.
The abolition of existing property relations
is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.
All property relations in the past have continually
been subject to historical change consequent
upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished
feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is
not the abolition of property generally, but
the abolition of bourgeois property.
But modern bourgeois private property is the
final and most complete expression of the
system of producing and appropriating products,
that is based on class antagonisms, on the
exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists
may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition
of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the
desire of abolishing the right of personally
acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s
own labour, which property is alleged to be
the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity
and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property!
Do you mean the property of petty artisan
and of the small peasant, a form of property
that preceded the bourgeois form?
There is no need to abolish that; the development
of industry has to a great extent already
destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private
property?
But does wage-labour create any property for
the labourer?
Not a bit.
It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property
which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot
increase except upon condition of begetting
a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation.
Property, in its present form, is based on
the antagonism of capital and wage labour.
Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a
purely personal, but a social status in production.
Capital is a collective product, and only
by the united action of many members, nay,
in the last resort, only by the united action
of all members of society, can it be set in
motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it
is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into
common property, into the property of all
members of society, personal property is not
thereby transformed into social property.
It is only the social character of the property
that is changed.
It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum
wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence
which is absolutely requisite to keep the
labourer in bare existence as a labourer.
What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates
by means of his labour, merely suffices to
prolong and reproduce a bare existence.
We by no means intend to abolish this personal
appropriation of the products of labour, an
appropriation that is made for the maintenance
and reproduction of human life, and that leaves
no surplus wherewith to command the labour
of others.
All that we want to do away with is the miserable
character of this appropriation, under which
the labourer lives merely to increase capital,
and is allowed to live only in so far as the
interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but
a means to increase accumulated labour.
In Communist society, accumulated labour is
but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote
the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past
dominates the present; in Communist society,
the present dominates the past.
In bourgeois society capital is independent
and has individuality, while the living person
is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things
is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality
and freedom!
And rightly so.
The abolition of bourgeois individuality,
bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom
is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois
conditions of production, free trade, free
selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free
selling and buying disappears also.
This talk about free selling and buying, and
all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois
about freedom in general, have a meaning,
if any, only in contrast with restricted selling
and buying, with the fettered traders of the
Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed
to the Communistic abolition of buying and
selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production,
and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away
with private property.
But in your existing society, private property
is already done away with for nine-tenths
of the population; its existence for the few
is solely due to its non-existence in the
hands of those nine-tenths.
You reproach us, therefore, with intending
to do away with a form of property, the necessary
condition for whose existence is the non-existence
of any property for the immense majority of
society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending
to do away with your property.
Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer
be converted into capital, money, or rent,
into a social power capable of being monopolised,
i.e., from the moment when individual property
can no longer be transformed into bourgeois
property, into capital, from that moment,
you say, individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual”
you mean no other person than the bourgeois,
than the middle-class owner of property.
This person must, indeed, be swept out of
the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to
appropriate the products of society; all that
it does is to deprive him of the power to
subjugate the labour of others by means of
such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition
of private property, all work will cease,
and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought
long ago to have gone to the dogs through
sheer idleness; for those of its members who
work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire
anything do not work.
The whole of this objection is but another
expression of the tautology: that there can
no longer be any wage-labour when there is
no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic
mode of producing and appropriating material
products, have, in the same way, been urged
against the Communistic mode of producing
and appropriating intellectual products.
Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance
of class property is the disappearance of
production itself, so the disappearance of
class culture is to him identical with the
disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments,
is, for the enormous majority, a mere training
to act as a machine.
But don’t wrangle with us so long as you
apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois
property, the standard of your bourgeois notions
of freedom, culture, law, &c.
Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the
conditions of your bourgeois production and
bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence
is but the will of your class made into a
law for all, a will whose essential character
and direction are determined by the economical
conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you
to transform into eternal laws of nature and
of reason, the social forms springing from
your present mode of production and form of
property – historical relations that rise
and disappear in the progress of production
– this misconception you share with every
ruling class that has preceded you.
What you see clearly in the case of ancient
property, what you admit in the case of feudal
property, you are of course forbidden to admit
in the case of your own bourgeois form of
property.
Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family!
Even the most radical flare up at this infamous
proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family,
the bourgeois family, based?
On capital, on private gain.
In its completely developed form, this family
exists only among the bourgeoisie.
But this state of things finds its complement
in the practical absence of the family among
the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter
of course when its complement vanishes, and
both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the
exploitation of children by their parents?
To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed
of relations, when we replace home education
by social.
And your education!
Is not that also social, and determined by
the social conditions under which you educate,
by the intervention direct or indirect, of
society, by means of schools, &c.?
The Communists have not invented the intervention
of society in education; they do but seek
to alter the character of that intervention,
and to rescue education from the influence
of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and
education, about the hallowed co-relation
of parents and child, becomes all the more
disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern
Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians
are torn asunder, and their children transformed
into simple articles of commerce and instruments
of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community
of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument
of production.
He hears that the instruments of production
are to be exploited in common, and, naturally,
can come to no other conclusion that the lot
of being common to all will likewise fall
to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real
point aimed at is to do away with the status
of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than
the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois
at the community of women which, they pretend,
is to be openly and officially established
by the Communists.
The Communists have no need to introduce community
of women; it has existed almost from time
immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives
and daughters of their proletarians at their
disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes,
take the greatest pleasure in seducing each
other’s wives.
Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system
of wives in common and thus, at the most,
what the Communists might possibly be reproached
with is that they desire to introduce, in
substitution for a hypocritically concealed,
an openly legalised community of women.
For the rest, it is self-evident that the
abolition of the present system of production
must bring with it the abolition of the community
of women springing from that system, i.e.,
of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with
desiring to abolish countries and nationality.
The working men have no country.
We cannot take from them what they have not
got.
Since the proletariat must first of all acquire
political supremacy, must rise to be the leading
class of the nation, must constitute itself
the nation, it is so far, itself national,
though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonism between
peoples are daily more and more vanishing,
owing to the development of the bourgeoisie,
to freedom of commerce, to the world market,
to uniformity in the mode of production and
in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause
them to vanish still faster.
United action, of the leading civilised countries
at least, is one of the first conditions for
the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual
by another will also be put an end to, the
exploitation of one nation by another will
also be put an end to.
In proportion as the antagonism between classes
within the nation vanishes, the hostility
of one nation to another will come to an end.
The charges against Communism made from a
religious, a philosophical and, generally,
from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving
of serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend
that man’s ideas, views, and conception,
in one word, man’s consciousness, changes
with every change in the conditions of his
material existence, in his social relations
and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove,
than that intellectual production changes
its character in proportion as material production
is changed?
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been
the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise
society, they do but express that fact that
within the old society the elements of a new
one have been created, and that the dissolution
of the old ideas keeps even pace with the
dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes,
the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity.
When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th
century to rationalist ideas, feudal society
fought its death battle with the then revolutionary
bourgeoisie.
The ideas of religious liberty and freedom
of conscience merely gave expression to the
sway of free competition within the domain
of knowledge.
“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious,
moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas
have been modified in the course of historical
development.
But religion, morality, philosophy, political
science, and law, constantly survived this
change.”
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such
as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common
to all states of society.
But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it
abolishes all religion, and all morality,
instead of constituting them on a new basis;
it therefore acts in contradiction to all
past historical experience.”
What does this accusation reduce itself to?
The history of all past society has consisted
in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms
that assumed different forms at different
epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one
fact is common to all past ages, viz., the
exploitation of one part of society by the
other.
No wonder, then, that the social consciousness
of past ages, despite all the multiplicity
and variety it displays, moves within certain
common forms, or general ideas, which cannot
completely vanish except with the total disappearance
of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical
rupture with traditional property relations;
no wonder that its development involved the
most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections
to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in
the revolution by the working class is to
raise the proletariat to the position of ruling
class to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy
to wrest, by degree, all capital from the
bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments
of production in the hands of the State, i.e.,
of the proletariat organised as the ruling
class; and to increase the total productive
forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be
effected except by means of despotic inroads
on the rights of property, and on the conditions
of bourgeois production; by means of measures,
therefore, which appear economically insufficient
and untenable, but which, in the course of
the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate
further inroads upon the old social order,
and are unavoidable as a means of entirely
revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different
in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries,
the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1.
Abolition of property in land and application
of all rents of land to public purposes.
2.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3.
Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants
and rebels.
5.
Centralisation of credit in the hands of the
state, by means of a national bank with State
capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6.
Centralisation of the means of communication
and transport in the hands of the State.
7.
Extension of factories and instruments of
production owned by the State; the bringing
into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement
of the soil generally in accordance with a
common plan.
8.
Equal liability of all to work.
Establishment of industrial armies, especially
for agriculture.
9.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing
industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction
between town and country by a more equable
distribution of the populace over the country.
10.
Free education for all children in public
schools.
Abolition of children’s factory labour in
its present form.
Combination of education with industrial production,
&c, &c.
When, in the course of development, class
distinctions have disappeared, and all production
has been concentrated in the hands of a vast
association of the whole nation, the public
power will lose its political character.
Political power, properly so called, is merely
the organised power of one class for oppressing
another.
If the proletariat during its contest with
the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force
of circumstances, to organise itself as a
class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes
itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps
away by force the old conditions of production,
then it will, along with these conditions,
have swept away the conditions for the existence
of class antagonisms and of classes generally,
and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy
as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with
its classes and class antagonisms, we shall
have an association, in which the free development
of each is the condition for the free development
of all.
Chapter 3.
Socialist and Communist Literature.
Part 1: Reactionary Socialism.
A: Feudal Socialism.
Owing to their historical position, it became
the vocation of the aristocracies of France
and England to write pamphlets against modern
bourgeois society.
In the French Revolution of July 1830, and
in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies
again succumbed to the hateful upstart.
Thenceforth, a serious political struggle
was altogether out of the question.
A literary battle alone remained possible.
But even in the domain of literature the old
cries of the restoration period had become
impossible.
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy
was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of
its own interests, and to formulate their
indictment against the bourgeoisie in the
interest of the exploited working class alone.
Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by
singing lampoons on their new masters and
whispering in his ears sinister prophesies
of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation,
half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half
menace of the future; at times, by its bitter,
witty and incisive criticism, striking the
bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but
always ludicrous in its effect, through total
incapacity to comprehend the march of modern
history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people
to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in
front for a banner.
But the people, so often as it joined them,
saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats
of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent
laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and
“Young England” exhibited this spectacle.
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation
was different to that of the bourgeoisie,
the feudalists forget that they exploited
under circumstances and conditions that were
quite different and that are now antiquated.
In showing that, under their rule, the modern
proletariat never existed, they forget that
the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring
of their own form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the
reactionary character of their criticism that
their chief accusation against the bourgeois
amounts to this, that under the bourgeois
régime a class is being developed which is
destined to cut up root and branch the old
order of society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is
not so much that it creates a proletariat
as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join
in all coercive measures against the working
class; and in ordinary life, despite their
high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up
the golden apples dropped from the tree of
industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour,
for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato
spirits.
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with
the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with
Feudal Socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism
a Socialist tinge.
Has not Christianity declaimed against private
property, against marriage, against the State?
Has it not preached in the place of these,
charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification
of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church?
Christian Socialism is but the holy water
with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings
of the aristocrat.
B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class
that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the
only class whose conditions of existence pined
and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois
society.
The medieval burgesses and the small peasant
proprietors were the precursors of the modern
bourgeoisie.
In those countries which are but little developed,
industrially and commercially, these two classes
still vegetate side by side with the rising
bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilisation has
become fully developed, a new class of petty
bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between
proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing
itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois
society.
The individual members of this class, however,
are being constantly hurled down into the
proletariat by the action of competition,
and, as modern industry develops, they even
see the moment approaching when they will
completely disappear as an independent section
of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures,
agriculture and commerce, by overlookers,
bailiffs and shopmen.
In countries like France, where the peasants
constitute far more than half of the population,
it was natural that writers who sided with
the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should
use, in their criticism of the bourgeois régime,
the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois,
and from the standpoint of these intermediate
classes, should take up the cudgels for the
working class.
Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism.
Sismondi was the head of this school, not
only in France but also in England.
This school of Socialism dissected with great
acuteness the contradictions in the conditions
of modern production.
It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of
economists.
It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous
effects of machinery and division of labour;
the concentration of capital and land in a
few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed
out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois
and peasant, the misery of the proletariat,
the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities
in the distribution of wealth, the industrial
war of extermination between nations, the
dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old
family relations, of the old nationalities.
In its positive aims, however, this form of
Socialism aspires either to restoring the
old means of production and of exchange, and
with them the old property relations, and
the old society, or to cramping the modern
means of production and of exchange within
the framework of the old property relations
that have been, and were bound to be, exploded
by those means.
In either case, it is both reactionary and
Utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture;
patriarchal relations in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts
had dispersed all intoxicating effects of
self-deception, this form of Socialism ended
in a miserable fit of the blues.
C. German or “True” Socialism
The Socialist and Communist literature of
France, a literature that originated under
the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and
that was the expressions of the struggle against
this power, was introduced into Germany at
a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country,
had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be philosophers,
and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly
seized on this literature, only forgetting,
that when these writings immigrated from France
into Germany, French social conditions had
not immigrated along with them.
In contact with German social conditions,
this French literature lost all its immediate
practical significance and assumed a purely
literary aspect.
Thus, to the German philosophers of the Eighteenth
Century, the demands of the first French Revolution
were nothing more than the demands of “Practical
Reason” in general, and the utterance of
the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie
signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure
Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true
human Will generally.
The work of the German literati consisted
solely in bringing the new French ideas into
harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience,
or rather, in annexing the French ideas without
deserting their own philosophic point of view.
This annexation took place in the same way
in which a foreign language is appropriated,
namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly
lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts
on which the classical works of ancient heathendom
had been written.
The German literati reversed this process
with the profane French literature.
They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath
the French original.
For instance, beneath the French criticism
of the economic functions of money, they wrote
“Alienation of Humanity”, and beneath
the French criticism of the bourgeois state
they wrote “Dethronement of the Category
of the General”, and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases
at the back of the French historical criticisms,
they dubbed “Philosophy of Action”, “True
Socialism”, “German Science of Socialism”,
“Philosophical Foundation of Socialism”,
and so on.
The French Socialist and Communist literature
was thus completely emasculated.
And, since it ceased in the hands of the German
to express the struggle of one class with
the other, he felt conscious of having overcome
“French one-sidedness” and of representing,
not true requirements, but the requirements
of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat,
but the interests of Human Nature, of Man
in general, who belongs to no class, has no
reality, who exists only in the misty realm
of philosophical fantasy.
This German socialism, which took its schoolboy
task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled
its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank
fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic
innocence.
The fight of the Germans, and especially of
the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy
and absolute monarchy, in other words, the
liberal movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long-wished for opportunity was
offered to “True” Socialism of confronting
the political movement with the Socialist
demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas
against liberalism, against representative
government, against bourgeois competition,
bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois
legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality,
and of preaching to the masses that they had
nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by
this bourgeois movement.
German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time,
that the French criticism, whose silly echo
it was, presupposed the existence of modern
bourgeois society, with its corresponding
economic conditions of existence, and the
political constitution adapted thereto, the
very things those attainment was the object
of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following
of parsons, professors, country squires, and
officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow
against the threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills
of flogging and bullets, with which these
same governments, just at that time, dosed
the German working-class risings.
While this “True” Socialism thus served
the government as a weapon for fighting the
German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time,
directly represented a reactionary interest,
the interest of German Philistines.
In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a relic
of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly
cropping up again under the various forms,
is the real social basis of the existing state
of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the
existing state of things in Germany.
The industrial and political supremacy of
the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain
destruction — on the one hand, from the
concentration of capital; on the other, from
the rise of a revolutionary proletariat.
“True” Socialism appeared to kill these
two birds with one stone.
It spread like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered
with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew
of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe
in which the German Socialists wrapped their
sorry “eternal truths”, all skin and bone,
served to wonderfully increase the sale of
their goods amongst such a public.
And on its part German Socialism recognised,
more and more, its own calling as the bombastic
representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the
model nation, and the German petty Philistine
to be the typical man.
To every villainous meanness of this model
man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic
interpretation, the exact contrary of its
real character.
It went to the extreme length of directly
opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency
of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme
and impartial contempt of all class struggles.
With very few exceptions, all the so-called
Socialist and Communist publications that
now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to
the domain of this foul and enervating literature.
Part Two: Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing
social grievances in order to secure the continued
existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists,
humanitarians, improvers of the condition
of the working class, organisers of charity,
members of societies for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner
reformers of every imaginable kind.
This form of socialism has, moreover, been
worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la
Misère as an example of this form.
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages
of modern social conditions without the struggles
and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom.
They desire the existing state of society,
minus its revolutionary and disintegrating
elements.
They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.
The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world
in which it is supreme to be the best; and
bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable
conception into various more or less complete
systems.
In requiring the proletariat to carry out
such a system, and thereby to march straightway
into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires
in reality, that the proletariat should remain
within the bounds of existing society, but
should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning
the bourgeoisie.
A second, and more practical, but less systematic,
form of this Socialism sought to depreciate
every revolutionary movement in the eyes of
the working class by showing that no mere
political reform, but only a change in the
material conditions of existence, in economical
relations, could be of any advantage to them.
By changes in the material conditions of existence,
this form of Socialism, however, by no means
understands abolition of the bourgeois relations
of production, an abolition that can be affected
only by a revolution, but administrative reforms,
based on the continued existence of these
relations; reforms, therefore, that in no
respect affect the relations between capital
and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost,
and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois
government.
Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression
when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure
of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working
class.
Protective duties: for the benefit of the
working class.
Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working
class.
This is the last word and the only seriously
meant word of bourgeois socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois
is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the
working class.
Part 3.
Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism
We do not here refer to that literature which,
in every great modern revolution, has always
given voice to the demands of the proletariat,
such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat
to attain its own ends, made in times of universal
excitement, when feudal society was being
overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the
then undeveloped state of the proletariat,
as well as to the absence of the economic
conditions for its emancipation, conditions
that had yet to be produced, and could be
produced by the impending bourgeois epoch
alone.
The revolutionary literature that accompanied
these first movements of the proletariat had
necessarily a reactionary character.
It inculcated universal asceticism and social
levelling in its crudest form.
The Socialist and Communist systems, properly
so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier,
Owen, and others, spring into existence in
the early undeveloped period, described above,
of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie.
The founders of these systems see, indeed,
the class antagonisms, as well as the action
of the decomposing elements in the prevailing
form of society.
But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy,
offers to them the spectacle of a class without
any historical initiative or any independent
political movement.
Since the development of class antagonism
keeps even pace with the development of industry,
the economic situation, as they find it, does
not as yet offer to them the material conditions
for the emancipation of the proletariat.
They therefore search after a new social science,
after new social laws, that are to create
these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal
inventive action; historically created conditions
of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the
gradual, spontaneous class organisation of
the proletariat to an organisation of society
especially contrived by these inventors.
Future history resolves itself, in their eyes,
into the propaganda and the practical carrying
out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are
conscious of caring chiefly for the interests
of the working class, as being the most suffering
class.
Only from the point of view of being the most
suffering class does the proletariat exist
for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle,
as well as their own surroundings, causes
Socialists of this kind to consider themselves
far superior to all class antagonisms.
They want to improve the condition of every
member of society, even that of the most favoured.
Hence, they habitually appeal to society at
large, without the distinction of class; nay,
by preference, to the ruling class.
For how can people, when once they understand
their system, fail to see in it the best possible
plan of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially
all revolutionary action; they wish to attain
their ends by peaceful means, necessarily
doomed to failure, and by the force of example,
to pave the way for the new social Gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society,
painted at a time when the proletariat is
still in a very undeveloped state and has
but a fantastic conception of its own position,
correspond with the first instinctive yearnings
of that class for a general reconstruction
of society.
But these Socialist and Communist publications
contain also a critical element.
They attack every principle of existing society.
Hence, they are full of the most valuable
materials for the enlightenment of the working
class.
The practical measures proposed in them — such
as the abolition of the distinction between
town and country, of the family, of the carrying
on of industries for the account of private
individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation
of social harmony, the conversion of the function
of the state into a more superintendence of
production — all these proposals point solely
to the disappearance of class antagonisms
which were, at that time, only just cropping
up, and which, in these publications, are
recognised in their earliest indistinct and
undefined forms only.
These proposals, therefore, are of a purely
Utopian character.
The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism
and Communism bears an inverse relation to
historical development.
In proportion as the modern class struggle
develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic
standing apart from the contest, these fantastic
attacks on it, lose all practical value and
all theoretical justification.
Therefore, although the originators of these
systems were, in many respects, revolutionary,
their disciples have, in every case, formed
mere reactionary sects.
They hold fast by the original views of their
masters, in opposition to the progressive
historical development of the proletariat.
They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently,
to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile
the class antagonisms.
They still dream of experimental realisation
of their social Utopias, of founding isolated
“phalansteres”, of establishing “Home
Colonies”, or setting up a “Little Icaria”
— duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem
— and to realise all these castles in the
air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings
and purses of the bourgeois.
By degrees, they sink into the category of
the reactionary [or] conservative Socialists
depicted above, differing from these only
by more systematic pedantry, and by their
fanatical and superstitious belief in the
miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political
action on the part of the working class; such
action, according to them, can only result
from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists
in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists
and the Réformistes.
Chapter 4.
Position of the Communists in Relation to
the Various Existing Opposition Parties.
Section II has made clear the relations of
the Communists to the existing working-class
parties, such as the Chartists in England
and the Agrarian Reformers in America.
The Communists fight for the attainment of
the immediate aims, for the enforcement of
the momentary interests of the working class;
but in the movement of the present, they also
represent and take care of the future of that
movement.
In France, the Communists ally with the Social-Democrats
against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie,
reserving, however, the right to take up a
critical position in regard to phases and
illusions traditionally handed down from the
great Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals,
without losing sight of the fact that this
party consists of antagonistic elements, partly
of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense,
partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists
on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition
for national emancipation, that party which
fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie
whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against
the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy,
and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant,
to instill into the working class the clearest
possible recognition of the hostile antagonism
between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order
that the German workers may straightway use,
as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie,
the social and political conditions that the
bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along
with its supremacy, and in order that, after
the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany,
the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may
immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly
to Germany, because that country is on the
eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound
to be carried out under more advanced conditions
of European civilisation and with a much more
developed proletariat than that of England
was in the seventeenth, and France in the
eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois
revolution in Germany will be but the prelude
to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support
every revolutionary movement against the existing
social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the
front, as the leading question in each, the
property question, no matter what its degree
of development at the time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union
and agreement of the democratic parties of
all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views
and aims.
They openly declare that their ends can be
attained only by the forcible overthrow of
all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic
revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but
their chains.
They have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!
