production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying
disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the
other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a
meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying,
with the fettered traders of the middle ages, but have no meaning when
opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the
bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property.
But in your existing society private property is already done away with
for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely
due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You
reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of
property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the
non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.
From the moment when 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 appropriation.
It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all
work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the
dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire
nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of
this objection is but another expression of tautology, that there can
no longer be any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital.
All objections against the Communistic mode of producing and
appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged
against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating
intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois the disappearance of
class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the
disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the
disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous
majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply to our intended
abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions
of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth
of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property,
just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a
law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are
determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal
laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your
present mode of production and form of property--historical relations
that rise and disappear in the progress of production--the
misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.
What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in
the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in
the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this
infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?
On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this
family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things
finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the
proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by
their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we
replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the
social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct
or indirect, of society by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have
not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek
to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education
from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the
hallowed co-relation of parent and child become all the more
disgusting, as, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among
the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into
simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the
whole bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He
hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common,
and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of
being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point 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 community of women; it has existed almost
from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes,
take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common, and thus,
at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is
that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically
concealed, an openly legalized community of women. For the rest it is
self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production
must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing
from that system, _i.e._, of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish
countries and nationality.
The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they
have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire
political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation,
must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national,
though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and
more vanishing; owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom
of commerce, to the world's 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 is put
an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put
an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the
nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an
end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical,
and, generally, from an ideological standpoint are not deserving of
serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views,
and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness changes with every
change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social
relations and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production
is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of
its ruling class.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society they do but
express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one
have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even
pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes the ancient religions
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the
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., they exploitation of one part of society by the other. No
wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all
the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common
forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the
total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional
property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most
radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working
class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class;
to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees,
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 of productive
forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of
despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of
bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear
economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of
the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the
old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely
revolutionizing the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries the following will be
pretty generally applicable:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land
to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands 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 liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial
armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries: gradual
abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more
equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of
children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education
with industrial production, etc., etc.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared
and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast
association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its
political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely
the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the
proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by
the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means
of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps
away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with
these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of
class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have
abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class
antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development
of each is the condition for the free development of all.
III.
SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE.
I. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM.
(_a_) _Feudal Socialism_.
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the
aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern
bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July, 1830, and in the
English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the
hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was
altogether out of question. A literary battle alone remained possible.
But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration
period(a) had become impossible.
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose
sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their
indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited
working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by
singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears
sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon;
half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its
bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the
very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total
incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the
proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often
as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of
arms and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists, and "Young England," exhibited
this spectacle.
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different from that
of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under
circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now
antiquated. In showing that under their rule the modern proletariat
never existed they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary
offspring of their own form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of
their criticism, that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie
amounts to this: that under the bourgeois _regime_ a class is being
developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of
society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a
proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures
against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high
falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from
the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honor for traffic
in wool, beet-root sugar and potato spirit(b).
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has
Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.
Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against
marriages, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of
these charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh,
monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the Holy
Water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the
aristocrat.
(_b_) _Petty Bourgeois Socialism_.
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the
bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and
perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval
burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the
modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed,
industrially and commercially these two classes still vegetate side by
side with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a
new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between
proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a
supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of
this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the
proletariat by the action of competition and as modern industry
develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will
completely disappear as an independent section of modern society to be
replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers,
bailiffs and shopmen.
In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than
half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the
proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use in their criticism of
the bourgeois _regime_, the standard of the peasant and petty
bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes should
take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty bourgeois
Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France
but also in England.
This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the
contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare
the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved incontrovertibly
the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labor; the
concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and
crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and
peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the
crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war
of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds,
of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to
restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them
the old property relations and the old society, or to cramping the
modern means of production and of exchange, within the frame work of
the old property relations that have been and were bound to be exploded
by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal
relations in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all
intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in
a miserable fit of the blues.
(_c_) _German or "True" Socialism_.
The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that
originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was
the expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into
Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie in that country had just begun
its contest with feudal absolutism.
German philosophers,--would-be philosophers and _beaux
esprits_,--eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when
these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social
conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German
social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate
practical significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to
the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the
first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of
"Practical Reason" in general, and the utterances of the will of the
revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes the laws of
pure will, of will as it was bound to be, of true human will generally.
The work of the German _literati_ consisted solely in bringing the new
French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience,
or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own
philosophic point of view.
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language
is appropriated, namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints
over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom
had been written. The German _literati_ reversed this process with the
profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense
beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French
criticism of the economic functions of money they wrote "Alienation of
Humanity," and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they
wrote "Dethronement of the Category of the General," and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the
French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of Action," "True
Socialism," "German Science of Socialism," "Philosophical Foundation of
Socialism," and so on.
The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely
emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to
express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of
having overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing not true
requirements but the requirements of truth, not the interests of the
proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who
belongs to no class, has no reality, and exists only in the misty realm
of philosophical phantasy.
This German Socialism, which took its school-boy task so seriously and
solemnly, and extolled its poor stock in trade in such mountebank
fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the German, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the
liberal movement, became more earnest.