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