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This document is brought to you by
The Marx/Engels WWW Archive
1848
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
MANIFESTO
OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
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CONTENTS
Prefaces:
o Preface to 1872 German edition
o Preface to 1882 Russian edition
o Preface to 1883 German edition
o Preface to 1888 English edition
o Preface to 1890 German edition
The Communist Manifesto:
1. Opening
2. Bourgoise and Proletarians
3. Proletarians and Communists
4. Socialist and Communist Literature
+ Reactionary Socialism
+ Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism
+ Critical-Utopian Socialism or Communism
5. Position of the Communists in relation to the various existing
opposition parties
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The Communist Manifesto
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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 Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by
its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the
branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition
parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
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.
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I
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
[1]
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The history of all hitherto existing society [2] is the history of class
struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master [3]
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open
fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated
arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social
rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the
Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,
serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new
classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the
old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct
feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and
more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.
>From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the
earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie
were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground
for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the
colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means
of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation,
to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the
revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was
monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants
of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The
guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division
of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of
division of labor in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by
the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY; the place of the industrial middle class by
industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the
modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of
America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to
commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in
turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry,
commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background
every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a
long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of
production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a
corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the
sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of
medieval commune [4]: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and
Germany); there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France);
afterward, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the
semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility,
and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general -- the
bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of
the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state,
exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a
committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the
motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left
no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
"cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious
fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy
water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into
exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In
one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it
has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored
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
laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has
reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of
vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its
fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to
show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far
surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has
conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations
and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing 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 revolutionizing 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 condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections 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 reactionaries, 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 civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up
indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones;
industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every
quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production
of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the
products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national
seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction,
universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in
intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become
more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local
literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,
by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the
most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities
are the heavy artillery 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 civilization 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 civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of
bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of
the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has
agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has
concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was
political centralization. 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,
canalization or 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 labor?
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 organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one
word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the
already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had
to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of
the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois
society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a
society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers
of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade
past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt
of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against
the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the
bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises
that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois
society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great
part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created
productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks
out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity
-- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back
into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal
war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence;
industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too
much civilization, 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? One the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of
productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the
more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the
way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the
means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are
now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those
weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same
proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a
class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find
work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must
sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of
commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of
competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the
work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and,
consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the
machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily
acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a
workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he
requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price
of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of
production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work
increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of
machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden
of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the
increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of
machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master
into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers,
crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the
industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of
officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and
of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,
by the overlooker, and, above all, in 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 labor, in
other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the
labor 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 labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age
and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at
an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other
portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker,
etc.
The lower strata of the middle class -- the small tradespeople, shopkeepers,
and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all
these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive
capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried
on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly
because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of
production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the
population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth
begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first, the contest is carried
on by individual laborers, then by the work of people of a factory, then by
the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual
bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against
the bourgeois condition of production, but against the instruments of
production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their
labor, 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 laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the
whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they
unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their
own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order
to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat
in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage,
therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of
their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the
non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical
movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so
obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in
number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and
it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life
within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in
proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition
among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of
the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery,
ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more
precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual
bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two
classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade 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 lie 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 centralize the numerous local struggles, all
of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every
class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the
burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required
centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few
years.
This organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into
a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition
between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger,
firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests
of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie
itself. Thus, the Ten-Hours Bill in England was carried.
Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in
many ways the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie
finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy;
later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests
have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the
bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself
compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus to drag it
into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the
proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in
other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the
bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are,
by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at
least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the
proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the
progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the
whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that
a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the
revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as,
therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the
bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the
proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who
have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the
historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the
proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes
decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat
is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan,
the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from
extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are
therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are
reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance,
they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer
into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future
interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of
the proletariat.
The "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown
off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept
into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life,
however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue.
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are
already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation
to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois
family relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the
same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of
every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so
many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many
bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their
already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions
of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive
forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of
appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.
They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to
destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the
interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense
majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot
stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of
official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with
the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each
country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own
bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat,
we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society,
up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where
the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of
the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on
the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress
a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at
least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom,
raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois,
under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a
bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the
process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of
existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more
rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the
bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to
impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is
unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave
within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a
state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no
longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no
longer compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois
class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for
capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between
the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by
the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern
Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which
the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie
therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the
victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
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FOOTNOTES
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[1] By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of
the means of social production and employers of wage labor.
By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means
of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in
order to live. [Note by Engels - 1888 English edition]
[2] That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society,
the social organization existing previous to recorded history, all but
unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered
common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it
to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in
history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to
have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to
Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society
was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861)
crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to
the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeaval communities, society
begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic
classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in Der Ursprung
der Familie, des Privateigenthumus und des Staats, second edition,
Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
[3] Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within,
not a head of a guild. [Engels: 1888 English edition]
[4] This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of
Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial
rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels: 1890 German
edition]
"Commune" was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before
they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local
self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally
speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is
here taken as the typical country, for its political development,
France. [Engels: 1888 English edition]
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II
PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
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In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The
Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class
parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a
whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape
and mold 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 lines of march, the conditions, and
the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other
proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of
the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas
or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that
would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an
existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very
eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a
distinctive feature of communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to
historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor 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 labor, which
property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity
and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of
petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the
bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of
industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying
it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It
creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and
which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of
wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based
on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of
this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social
STATUS in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the
united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united
action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the
property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby
transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the
property that is changed. It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage labor.
The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of
the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer
in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer
appropriates by means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce
a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal
appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for
the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus
wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with
is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer
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 labor is but a means to increase accumulated
labor. In communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to
enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in
communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society,
capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is
dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois,
abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of
bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is
undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production,
free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears
also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave
words" of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any,
only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered
traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the
communist abolition of buying and selling, or 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 labor can no longer be converted into capital, money,
or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, 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
labor of others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work
will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs
through sheer idleness; for those who acquire anything, do not work. The
whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: There
can no longer be any wage labor when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the communistic mode of producing and
appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against
the communistic mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products.
Just as to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the
disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is
to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a
mere training to act as a machine.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of
bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom,
culture, law, 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 stringing 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 proletarians, and in
public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement
vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their
parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace
home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social
conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect,
of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended 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 claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed
correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more,
by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians
are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of
commerce and instruments of labor.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the
bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that
the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally,
can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will
likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with
the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of
our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly
and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to
introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the
greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. (Ah, those were the days!)
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 legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that
the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the
abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution
both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and
nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not
got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy,
must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the
nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of
the word.
National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more
vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of
commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and
in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.
United action of the leading civilized countries at least is one of the
first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be
put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an
end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation
vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and,
generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious
examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and
conception, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in
the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his
social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production
changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The
ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but
express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have
been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with
the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were
overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth
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
juridicial 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
relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture
with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism.
We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working
class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the
battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all
capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in
the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling
class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of
despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of
bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear
economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the
movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old
social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the
mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty
generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to
public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a
national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in he 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 obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies,
especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual
abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more
equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of
children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education
with industrial production, etc.
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 organized power of one
class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the
bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize 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 struggle was altogether out of the
question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain
of literature, the old cries of the restoration period had become
impossible. [1]
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight,
apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against
the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus,
the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters
and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an
echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty
and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core,
but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend
the march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian
alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them,
saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with
loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England" exhibited this
spectacle:
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the
bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances
and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In
showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they
forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own
form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their
criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this:
that under the bourgeois 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 corrective 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 honor, for traffic in wool,
beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. [2]
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has clerical
socialism with feudal socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge. Has
not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage,
against the state? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and
poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother
Church? Christian socialism is but the holy water with which the priest
consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
b. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the
bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and
perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval
burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the
modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed,
industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side
with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new
class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat
and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself a supplementary part of bourgeois
society. The individual members of this class, however, as 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 labor; 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 it 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
hangover.
c. German or "True" Socialism
The socialist and communist literature of France, a literature that
originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the
expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany
at a time when the bourgeoisie in that country had just begun its contest
with feudal absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of
letters), eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when these
writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had
not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions,
this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and
assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the
eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing
more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the utterance of
the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes,
the laws of pure will, of will as it was bound to be, of true human will
generally.
The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French
ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather,
in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point
of view.
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is
appropriated, namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic saints over the
manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been
written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French
literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French
original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic
functions of money, they wrote "alienation of humanity", and beneath the
French criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote "dethronement of the
category of the general", and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French
historical criticisms, they dubbed "Philosophy of Action", "True Socialism",
"German Science of Socialism", "Philosophical Foundation of Socialism", and
so on.
The French socialist and communist literature was thus completely
emasculated. And, since it ceased, in the hands of the German, to express
the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having
overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing, not true requirements,
but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the
interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has
no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and
solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion,
meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the
liberal movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of
confronting the political movement with the socialistic demands, of hurling
the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative
government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press,
bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to
the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this
bourgeois movement. German socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the
French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of
modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of
existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things
those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors,
country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the
threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with
which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German
working-class risings.
While this "True" Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for
fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented
a reactionary interest, the interest of German philistines. In Germany, the
petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then
constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social
basis of the existing state of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in
Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens
it with certain destruction -- on the one hand, from the concentration of
capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True"
Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an
epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric,
steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which
the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths", all skin and
bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a
public. And on its part German socialism recognized, 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. [3]
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, organizers 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 Philosophy of Poverty 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
straightaway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality that
the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but
should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism
sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working
class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the
material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any
advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this
form of socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the
bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by
a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence
of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the
relations between capital and labor, 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 [4] and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in
times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown,
necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat,
as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation,
conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the
impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that
accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a
reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social
levelling in its crudest form.
The socialist and communist systems, properly so called, those of
Saint-Simon [5], Fourier [6], Owen [7], 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 organization of the proletariat to an
organization of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future
history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the
practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for
the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only
from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the
proletariat exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own
surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far
superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of
every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they
habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class;
nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people when once they
understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the
best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action;
they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to
failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social
gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the
proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic
conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive
yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.
But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical
element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are
full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working
class. The practical measures proposed in them -- such as the abolition of
the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on
of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage
system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the function
of the state into a more superintendence of production -- all these
proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were,
at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are
recognized 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 justifications. 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, endeavor, and
that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class
antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social
utopias, of founding isolated phalansteres, of establishing "Home Colonies",
or setting up a "Little Icaria" [8] -- pocket editions of the New Jerusalem
-- and to realize 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 Reformistes.
------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES
------------------------------------
[1] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: Not the English Restoration
(1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830).
[2] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: This applies chiefly to
Germany, where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large
portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards,
and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and
distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier british aristocracy are, as
yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for
declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less
shady joint-stock companies.
[3] NOTE by Engels to 1888 German edition: The revolutionary storm of
1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists
of the desire to dabble in socialism. The chief representative and
classical type of this tendency is Mr Karl Gruen.
[4] Francois Noel Babeuf (1760-1797): French political agitator;
plotted unsuccessfully to destroy the Directory in revolutionary France
and established a communistic system.
[5] Comte de Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy (1760-1825): French
social philosopher; generally regarded as founder of French socialism.
He thought society should be reorganized along industrial lines and
that scientists should be the new spiritual leaders. His most important
work is Nouveau Christianisme (1825).
[6] Charles Fourier (1772-1837): French social reformer; propounded a
system of self-sufficient cooperatives known as Fourierism, especially
in his work Le Nouveau Monde industriel (1829-30)
[7] Richard Owen (1771-1858): Welsh industrialist and social reformer.
He formed a model industrial community at New Lanark, Scotland, and
pioneered cooperative societies. His books include New View Of Society
(1813).
[8] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: "Home Colonies" were what
Owen called his communist model societies. Phalansteres were socialist
colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by
Caber to his utopia and, later on, to his American communist colony.
--------------------------------------
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 with the Social Democrats *
against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the
right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions
traditionally handed down from the Great Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact
that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic
Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as
the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the
insurrection of Krakow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a
revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy,
and the petty-bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working
class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between
bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may
straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and
political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along
with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary
classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately
begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country
is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out
under more advanced conditions of European civilization and with a much more
developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and
France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in
Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian
revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in
each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the
time.
Finally, they labor 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 communist
revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win.
Working men of all countries, unite!
------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES
------------------------------------
* NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: The party then represented in
Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc (1811-82), in
the daily press by the Reforme. The name of Social-Democracy signifies,
with these its inventors, a section of the Democratic or Republican
Party more or less tinged with socialism.
--------------------------------------
PREFACE TO 1872 GERMAN EDITION
--------------------------------------
The Communist League, an international association of workers, which could
of course be only a secret one, under conditions obtaining at the time,
commissioned us, the undersigned, at the Congress held in London in November
1847, to write for publication a detailed theoretical and practical
programme for the Party. Such was the origin of the following Manifesto, the
manuscript of which travelled to London to be printed a few weeks before the
February Revolution. First published in German, it has been republished in
that language in at least twelve different editions in Germany, England, and
America. It was published in English for the first time in 1850 in the Red
Republican, London, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and in 1871 in at
least three different translations in America. The french version first
appeared in Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848, and recently
in Le Socialiste of New York. A new translation is in the course of
preparation. A Polish version appeared in London shortly after it was first
published in Germany. A Russian translation was published in Geneva in the
'sixties. Into Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its appearance.
However much that state of things may have altered during the last
twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on
the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be
improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the
Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical
conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special
stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section
II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today.
In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the
accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in
view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution,
and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the
first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in
some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the
Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made
state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." (See The Civil War in
France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's
Assocation, 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is
self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in
relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that
the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition
parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice
are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed,
and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion
of the political parties there enumerated.
But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no
longer any right to alter. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with an
introduction bridging the gap from 1847 to the present day; but this reprint
was too unexpected to leave us time for that.
KARL MARX
FREDERICK ENGELS
June 24, 1872
London
--------------------------------------
PREFACE TO 1882 RUSSIAN EDITION
--------------------------------------
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,
translated by Bakunin, was published early in the 'sixties by the printing
office of the Kolokol. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of
the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible
today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time
(December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position of
the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various
countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It was
the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European
reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of
Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw
materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial
products. Bother were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the
existing European system.
How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North
American for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is
shaking the very foundations of European landed property -- large and small.
At the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous
industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break
the industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England,
existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon
America itself. Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the
farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the
competition of giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat
and a fabulous concentration of capital funds are developing for the first
time in the industrial regions.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European
princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from
the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar
was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of
war of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia forms the vanguard of
revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the
inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia
we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and
bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned
in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina,
though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership of land,
pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the
contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as
constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution
becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both
complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may
serve as the starting point for a communist development.
KARL MARX
FREDERICK ENGELS
January 21, 1882
London
--------------------------------------
PREFACE TO 1883 GERMAN EDITION
--------------------------------------
The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man
to whom the whole working class class of Europe and America owes more than
to any one else -- rests at Highgate Cemetary and over his grave the first
first grass is already growing. Since his death [March 13, 1883], there can
be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But I
consider it all the more necessary again to state the following expressly:
The basic thought running through the Manifesto -- that economic production,
and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising
therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual
history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the
primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of
class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between
dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution; that
this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and
oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the
class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same
time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression,
class struggles -- this basic thought belongs soley and exclusively to Marx.
[ENGELS FOOTNOTE TO PARAGRAPH: "This proposition", I wrote in the
preface to the English translation, "which, in my opinion, is
destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for
biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for some
years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards
it is best shown by my Conditions of the Working Class in England.
But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it
already worked out and put it before me in terms almost as clear
as those in which I have stated it here."]
I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary
that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.
FREDERICK ENGELS
June 28, 1883
London
--------------------------------------
PREFACE TO 1888 ENGLISH EDITION
--------------------------------------
The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a
working men's association, first exclusively German, later on international,
and under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably
a secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in November 1847, Marx
and Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete theoretical and practical
party programme. Drawn up in German, in January 1848, the manuscript was
sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French Revolution of
February 24. A French translation was brought out in Paris shortly before
the insurrection of June 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen
