Produced by Al Haines, from images obtained from The Internet Archive.
Manifesto
Of the
Communist
Party
By
KARL MARX
and
FREDERICK ENGELS
AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Edited and Annotated by Frederick Engels
_Price 10 Cents_
NEW YORK
Published by the New York Labor News Co., 28 City Hall Place
1908
PREFACE
The "Manifesto" was published as the platform of the "Communist
League," a workingmen's association, first exclusively German, later on
international, and, under the political conditions of the Continent
before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the
League, held in London in November, 1847, Marx and Engels were
commissioned to prepare for publication a complete theoretical and
practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January, 1848, the
manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the
French revolution of February 24. A French translation was brought out
in Paris, shortly before the insurrection of June, 1848. The first
English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George
Julian Harney's "Red Republican," London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish
edition had also been published.
The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June, 1848--the first great
battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie--drove again into the
background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the
European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was
again, as it had been before the revolution of February, solely between
the different sections of the propertied class; the working class was
reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of
extreme wing of the Middle-class Radicals. Wherever independent
proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were
ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the
Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The
members were arrested, and, after eighteen months' imprisonment, they
were tried in October, 1852. This celebrated "Cologne Communist trial"
lasted from October 4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were
sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to
six years. Immediately after the sentence the League was formally
dissolved by the remaining members. As to the "Manifesto," it seemed
thenceforth to be doomed to oblivion.
When the European working class had recovered sufficient strength for
another attack on the ruling classes, the International Workingmen's
Association sprang up. But this association, formed with the express
aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe
and America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the
"Manifesto." The International was bound to have a programme broad
enough to be acceptable to the English Trades' Unions, to the followers
of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy and Spain, and to the
Lassalleans(a) in Germany. Marx, who drew up this programme to the
satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual
development of the working class, which was sure to result from
combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and
vicissitudes of the struggle against Capital, the defeats even more
than the victories, could not help bringing home to men's minds the
insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way
for a more complete insight into the true conditions of working-class
emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking
up in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it had found
them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were
dying out, and even the conservative English Trades' Unions, though
most of them had long since severed their connection with the
International, were gradually advancing towards that point at which,
last year at Swansea, their President could say in their name,
"Continental Socialism has lost its terrors for us." In fact, the
principles of the "Manifesto" had made considerable headway among the
workingmen of all countries.
The Manifesto itself thus came to the front again. The German text had
been, since 1850, reprinted several times in Switzerland, England and
America. In 1872 it was translated into English in New York, where the
translation was published in "Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly." From
this English version a French one was made in "Le Socialiste" of New
York. Since then at least two more English translations, more or less
mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one of them has been
reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made by
Bakounine, was published at Herzen's "Kolokol" office in Geneva, about
1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulitch, also in Geneva, 1882.
A new Danish edition is to be found in "Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek,"
Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation in "Le Socialiste," Paris,
1886. From this latter a Spanish version was prepared and published in
Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted; there have
been twelve altogether at the least. An Armenian translation, which
was to be published in Constantinople some months ago, did not see the
light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a
book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator declined to call
it his own production. Of further translations into other languages I
have heard, but have not seen them. Thus the history of the Manifesto
reflects, to a great extent, the history of the modern working class
movement; at present it is undoubtedly the most widespread, the most
international production of all Socialist Literature, the common
platform acknowledged by millions of workingmen from Siberia to
California.
Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a _Socialist_
Manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand,
the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England,
Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of
mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most
multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed
to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of
social grievances; in both cases men outside the working class movement
and looking rather to the "educated" classes for support. Whatever
portion of the working classes had become convinced of the
insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the
necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself
Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of
Communism; still it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough
among the working class to produce the Utopian Communism, in France of
Cabet, and in Germany of Weitling. Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, a
middle class movement, Communism a working class movement. Socialism
was, on the Continent at least, "respectable"; Communism was the very
opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning was, that "the
emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class
itself," there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must
take. Moreover, we have ever since been far from repudiating it.
The "Manifesto" being our joint production, I consider myself bound to
state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs
to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the
prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social
organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which
is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and
intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history
of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding
land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles,
contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed
classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of
evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the
exploited and the oppressed class--the proletariat--cannot attain its
emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class--the
bourgeoisie--without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating
society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions
and class struggles.
This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history
what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been
gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had
independently progressed toward it, is best shown by my "Condition of
the Working Class in England."(b) But when I again met Marx at
Brussels in the spring of 1845, he had it ready worked out, and put it
before me, in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it
here.
From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the
following:
"However much the state of things may have altered during the last
twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this Manifesto
are, on the whole, as correct to-day as ever. Here and there some
detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles
will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all
times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and
for that reason no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures
proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many
respects, be very differently worded to-day. In view of the gigantic
strides of modern industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved
and extended organization of the working class; in view of the
practical experience gained, first in the February revolution, and
then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the
first time held political power for two whole months, this programme
has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved
by the Commune, viz., that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of
the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.'
(See 'The Civil War in France; Address of the General Council of the
International Workingmen's Association,' London, Truelove, 1871, p. 15,
where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident
that the criticism of Socialist literature is deficient in relation to
the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also, that the
remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition
parties (Section IV.), although in principle still correct, yet in
practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been
entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the
earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.
"But, then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we
have no longer any right to alter."
The present translation is by Mr. Samuel Moore, the translator of the
greater portion of Marx's "Capital." We have revised it and I have
added a few notes explanatory of historical allusions.
FREDERICK ENGELS.
London, January 30, 1888.
(a) Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a
disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the "Manifesto."
But in his public agitation, 1862-64, he did not go beyond demanding
co-operative workshops supported by State credit.
(b) The condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. By
Frederick Engels. Translated by Florence K. Wischnewetzky. To be had
from the N. Y. Labor News Co., 28 City Hall Place, New York.
MANIFESTO
OF THE
COMMUNIST PARTY.
BY KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS.
A specter is haunting Europe--the specter of Communism. All the powers
of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
specter; 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 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 in
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 Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of
the party itself.
To this end the 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.(a)
The history of all hitherto existing society(b) is the history of class
struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guildmaster(c) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,
stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either
in the 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 bourgeois, 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 colonization 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
monopolized by close 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 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
manufacture 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 whole industrial
armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world's market, for which the
discovery of America paved the way. The market has given an immense
development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This
development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and
in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation and 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 medieval commune(d), 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's 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, callous "cash payment." It has drowned the
most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm,
of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and
in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up
that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has
substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto
honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the
physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into
its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and
has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal
display of vigor 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 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 forms, 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 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 connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world's 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 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 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 civilization. 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 civilization into their midst,
_i.e._, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a
world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It
has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population
as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of
the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the
country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and
semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of
peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state
of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has
agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has
concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of
this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely
connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and
systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one
government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one
frontier, and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has
created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all
preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man,
machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam
navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents
for cultivation, canalization 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 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.
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
bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the
existing products, but also of the previously created productive
forces, is periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an
epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an
absurdity--the epidemic of overproduction. 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 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 his maintenance, and for the
propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore
also of labor, is equal, in the long run, 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 labor increase, 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
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 over-seer, 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 skill and exertion of strength is 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 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 portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper,
the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class--the small trades-people,
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 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 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, and land owners, 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 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 unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing,
makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between
individual workman 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
improved means of communication that are created in 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
proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organization of the proletarians into a class and consequently
into a political party, is continually being upset again by the
competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up
again; stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition
of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the
divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in
England was carried.
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further,
in many ways, the course of the 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 countries 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 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 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 to-day,
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 class
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 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 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-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 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, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the
victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
(a) By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of
the means of social production and employers of wage-labor. By
proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of
production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in
order to live.
(b) That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society,
the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all
but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of
land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which
all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village
communities were found to be, or to have been the primitive form of
society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of
this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form,
by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true nature of the Gens and its
relation to the Tribe. With the dissolution of these primaeval
communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and
finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process
of dissolution in: "Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und
des Staats," 2nd edit., Stuttgart, 1886.
(c) Guildmaster, that is a full member of a guild, a master within, not
a head of a guild.
(d) "Commune" was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even
before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters, local
self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate." Generally
speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is
here taken as the typical country; for its political development,
France.
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 Communists 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 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 ground work 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 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 condition of
begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property,
in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage
labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social
status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the
united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the
united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not 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-labor.
The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, _i.e._, that
quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to
keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the
wage-laborer appropriates by means of his labor, merely suffices to
prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to
abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an
appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of
human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor
of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable
character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely
to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the
interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase
accumulated labor. In Communist society accumulated labor is but a
means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in
Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois
society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living
person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois:
abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition
of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois
freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.