The Communist Manifesto



by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels





[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]









Contents



 I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS

 II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS

 III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE

 IV. POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES









A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the Powers

of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this

spectre: Pope and Czar, 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.



I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be

itself a Power.



II. 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 Spectre 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.









I.

BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS





The history of all hitherto existing societies 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

re-constitution 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 distinctive feature: it has

simplified the 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, under 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

manufacture 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 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 time, 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 mediaeval 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 manufacture proper,

serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a

counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone 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 and indefeasible chartered

freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In

one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political

illusions, 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 Reactionists 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 whole 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 productions 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 its 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 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 to it, and by the economical 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 bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is

enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return

put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the

entire bourgeois society. 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 inforced 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 piece-meal, 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 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 his 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 increase of

the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the

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 over-looker, 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, 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 specialized skill is rendered

worthless by the 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 operatives 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 bourgeoisie. 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 unceasing 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

proletarians, 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 times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In

all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the

proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the

political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the

proletariat with its own instruments 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 classes

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

process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within

the whole range of 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 so only 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,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass

thrown off by the lowest layers of 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 conditions 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 industrial 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 interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the

self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the

interests 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 feudal absolutism,

managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the

contrary, instead of rising with the progress 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 condition 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 laborers. The advance of industry, whose

involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the

labourers, due to competition, by their 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, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory

of the proletariat are equally inevitable.









II.

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 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 Communist is the same as that of all the 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 the 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 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 a 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 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 bourgeoisie 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 appropriation.



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 modes 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, etc. 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 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 will 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, etc.? 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 parent and child, becomes all the more

disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all 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

whole bourgeoisie in chorus.



The bourgeois sees in 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 than that the lot of

being common to all will likewise fall to the women.



He has not even a suspicion that the real point 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 the 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 antagonisms 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 is 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 conceptions, 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 ideas that revolutionise society, they do but

express the 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 involves 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 as

to win the battle of democracy.



The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees,

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 of 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 the 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 right 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 labour. Establishment of industrial

armies, especially for agriculture.



9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual

abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more

equable distribution of the population 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.









III.

SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE



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 contest 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 were obliged to lose

sight, apparently, of their 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 master, and whispering in his ears sinister

prophecies of coming catastrophe.



In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon;

half 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 bourgeoisie

amounts to this, that under the bourgeois _regime_ 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 mediaeval

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 _regime_, 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 expression 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_,

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 law of pure Will, of Will as it

was bound to be, of true human Will generally.



The world 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 mountebank

fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.



The fight of the German, 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 whose 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 floggings and bullets

with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German

working-class risings.



While this “True” Socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for

fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly

represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German

Philistines. In Germany the _petty bourgeois_ class, a _relique_ of the

sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under

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.



2. 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 economic

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 effected 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.



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, these attempts 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 (see Section 1. Bourgeois and

Proletarians).



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 the

organisation of society specially 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 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, and

endeavour, by small experiments, 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 functions of the State into a mere

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,” of

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 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.”









IV.

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 themselves with

the Social-Democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie,

reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard

to phrases 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 instil into the working

class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism

between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers

may straightaway 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 of 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!