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Manifesto of the
Communist Party A
spectre is haunting 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: 1.
Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself
a power. 2.
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
Chapter 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians[1] The history of all hitherto existing society[2]
is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and
plebeian, 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, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals,
guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these
classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has
sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class
antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the
bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified
class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two
great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other
— bourgeoisie and proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages
sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the
first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of 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 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 ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous
enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place
of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation,
veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its
halo every occupation hitherto 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 vigour in the Middle Ages, which
reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most
slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can
bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids,
Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put
in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
constantly 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, 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? On the one hand, by enforced destruction
of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets,
and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by
paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by
diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie
felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie
forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into
existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working
class — the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie,
i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the
modern working class, developed— a class of 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 Altogether, collisions between the
classes of the old society furthering 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 super incumbent 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
capitalist 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. Chapter 2: Proletarians
and Communists
In what relation do the
Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? the Communists do not form a
separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests
separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any
sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and 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 anew 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 where with 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. 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 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 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 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
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. Chapter 4: Position of the Communists in
Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties Section II
has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class
parties, such as the Chartists in 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 In In In 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. WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! |
