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<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO ***</div>
<h1>The Communist Manifesto</h1>
<h2 class="no-break">by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels</h2>
<p class="center">
[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]
</p>
<hr />
<h2>Contents</h2>
<table summary="" style="">
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap01">I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap02">II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap03">III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap04">IV. POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class="chapter">
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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?
</p>
<p>
Two things result from this fact.
</p>
<p>
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a
Power.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap01"></a>I.<br />
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS</h2>
<p>
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggles.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has
reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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>i.e</i>., to become bourgeois themselves. In
one word, it creates a world after its own image.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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?
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now
turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, <i>i.e</i>., 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap02"></a>II.<br />
PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS</h2>
<p>
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
</p>
<p>
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class
parties.
</p>
<p>
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a
whole.
</p>
<p>
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and
mould the proletarian movement.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical
change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
</p>
<p>
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of
bourgeois property.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single
sentence: Abolition of private property.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social
<i>status</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Let us now take wage-labour.
</p>
<p>
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, <i>i.e</i>., 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free
trade, free selling and buying.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property.
Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
</p>
<p>
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or
rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, <i>i.e</i>., from the
moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois
property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will
cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a
mere training to act as a machine.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous
proposal of the Communists.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement
vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
</p>
<p>
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their
parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
</p>
<p>
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace
home education by social.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole
bourgeoisie in chorus.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status
of women as mere instruments of production.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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>i.e</i>., of
prostitution both public and private.
</p>
<p>
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and
nationality.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>the</i>
nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of
the word.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and,
generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious
examination.
</p>
<p>
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?
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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>i.e</i>., of the proletariat organised as the ruling
class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
These measures will of course be different in different countries.
</p>
<p>
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty
generally applicable.
</p>
<p>
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public
purposes.
</p>
<p>
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
</p>
<p>
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
</p>
<p>
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
</p>
<p>
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national
bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
</p>
<p>
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of
the State.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies,
especially for agriculture.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap03"></a>III.<br />
SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE</h2>
<h3>1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM</h3>
<p class="center">
<i>A. Feudal Socialism</i>
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
One section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited
this spectacle.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>regime</i> a class is being developed, which is
destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.
</p>
<p>
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a
proletariat, as that it creates a <i>revolutionary</i> proletariat.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical
Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p class="center">
<i>B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism</i>
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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
<i>regime</i>, 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture, patriarchal relations in
agriculture.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p class="center">
<i>C. German, or “True,” Socialism</i>
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and <i>beaux esprits</i>, 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.
</p>
<p>
The world of the German <i>literati</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is
appropriated, namely, by translation.
</p>
<p>
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints <i>over</i> the
manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been
written. The German <i>literati</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors,
country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the
threatening bourgeoisie.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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
<i>petty bourgeois</i> class, a <i>relique</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<h3>2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM</h3>
<p>
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order
to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
We may cite Proudhon’s <i>Philosophie de la Misère</i> as an example of
this form.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it
becomes a mere figure of speech.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the
benefit of the working class.
</p>
<h3>3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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).
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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?
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose
the Chartists and the “Réformistes.”
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap04"></a>IV.<br />
POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic
parties of all countries.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO ***</div>
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