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Title: The Communist Manifesto

Author: Karl Marx
Friedrich Engels

Release date: January 25, 2005 [eBook #61]
Most recently updated: March 2, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61

Credits: Allen Lutins and Jim Tarzia

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
COMMUNIST MANIFESTO ***

The Communist Manifesto

by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]

Contents

I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE
IV. POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE
VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the
Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and
German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as
Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has
not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more
advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be
itself a Power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the
whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this
nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party
itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in
London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the
English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

I.
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-
constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated
arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social
rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the
Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,
serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established
new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place
of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses,
however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile
camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and
Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the
earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie
were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh
ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the

colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means
of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to
navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the
revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was
monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing
wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The
guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class;
division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the
face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by
the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by
industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern
bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the
discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense
development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This
development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in
proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the
same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and
pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle
Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a
long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of
production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a
corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the
sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the
mediaeval commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and
Germany), there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France),
afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-
feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and,
in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has
at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market,

conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political
sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing
the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley
feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining
no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
“cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious
fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy
water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into
exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In
one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto
honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the
physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid
wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and
has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display
of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its
fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to
show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far
surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it
has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of
nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of
production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and

venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all
that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober
senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To
the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of
industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national
industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are
dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death
question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up
indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones;
industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every
quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions
of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the
products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national
seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction,
universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in
intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness
become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and
local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of
production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws
all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its
commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese
walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of
foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to
adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what
it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In
one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has
created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as

compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the
population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country
dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian
countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of
bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered
state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has
agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.
The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent,
or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws,
governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one
nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest,
one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of
scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal
productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection
of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry
and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of
whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations
conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment
that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose
foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society.
At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of
exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and
exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing
industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer
compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so
many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway
of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois
society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a
society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of
the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade

past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of
modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against
the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the
bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises
that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly,
the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not
only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive
forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an
epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the
epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a
state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of
devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry
and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much
civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much
commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend
to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the
contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which
they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring
disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of
bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to
comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get
over these crises? On the one hand inforced destruction of a mass of
productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the
more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the
way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the
means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground
are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those
weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same
proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class
of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work
only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must
sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of

commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of
competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the
work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently,
all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and
it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired
knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman
is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for
his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a
commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production.
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage
decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of
labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases,
whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work
exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal
master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers,
crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the
industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of
officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and
of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,
by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer
himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and
aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in
other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the
labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex
have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are
instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age
and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far
at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other
portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker,
etc.
The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants

—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their
diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry
is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists,
partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new
methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of
the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth
begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by
individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the
operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois
who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the
bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of
production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their
labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek
to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over
the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere
they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of
their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in
order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole
proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this
stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies
of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the
non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical
movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so
obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in
number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and
it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life
within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in
proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition
among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages
of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of
machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and
more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual

bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two
classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades
Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the
rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make
provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the
contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real
fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-
expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved
means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place
the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just
this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all
of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every
class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the
burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required
centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few
years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a
political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between
the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer,
mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the
workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself.
Thus the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in
many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie
finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later
on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have
become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the
bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled
to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the
political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat
with its own instruments of political and general education, in other words,
it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are,
by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least

threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat
with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the
process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the
whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a
small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary
class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an
earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now
a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a
portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the
level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the
proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and
finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special
and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the
shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie,
to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They
are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are
reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they
are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into
the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests,
they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the
proletariat.
The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass
thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept
into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life,
however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue.
In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are
already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation
to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the
bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to
capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has
stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion,
are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just
as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their
already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of
appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive
forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of
appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.
They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to
destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in
the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the
immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society,
cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata
of official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with
the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country
must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the
proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within
existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open
revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the
foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen,
on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to
oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can,
at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom,
raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois,
under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.
The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of
industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his
own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than
population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is
unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its
conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule
because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his
slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has
to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under

this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with
society.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the
bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition
for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition
between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter
is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to
competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The
development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the
very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own
grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable.

II.
PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-
class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as
a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to
shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties
by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different
countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the
entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages
of development which the struggle of the working class against the
bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the
interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most
advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country,
that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand,
theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage
of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate
general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other
proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the
bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on
ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that
would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual

relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical
movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property
relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to
historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour
of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property
generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois
private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of
producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms,
on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the
right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour,
which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom,
activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property
of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that
preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the
development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is
still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It
creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and
which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of
wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on
the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of
this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status
in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action
of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all
members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the
property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby
transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the
property that is changed. It loses its class-character.
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that
quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in bare
existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by
means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare
existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of
the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance
and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to
command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with, is the
miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives
merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the
interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated
labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen,
to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in
Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society
capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is
dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois,
abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of
bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is
undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of
production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears
also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave
words” of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any,
only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders
of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the
Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of
production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But
in your existing society, private property is already done away with for
nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its
non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore,
with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition
for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense
majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital,
money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from
the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into
bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality
vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other
person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This
person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of
society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the
labour of others by means of such appropriation.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work
will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the
dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire
nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this
objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer
be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and
appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against
the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual
products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the
disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is
to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority,
a mere training to act as a machine.

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition
of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom,
culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of
your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your
jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will,
whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical
conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws
of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode
of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and
disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with
every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of
ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of
course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of
property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous
proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?
On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family
exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its
complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians,
and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by
their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we
replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social
conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect,
of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented
the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the
character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of
the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the
hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting,
the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the
proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple
articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams
the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears
that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and,
naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being
common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the
status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of
our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be
openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have
no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time
immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the
greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.
Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus,
at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is
that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed,
an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident
that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the
abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of
prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish
countries and nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they
have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political
supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute
itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois
sense of the word.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more
and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to
freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of
production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.
United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first
conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an
end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to.
In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes,
the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical,
and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious
examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and
conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change
in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his
social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production is
changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling
class.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but
express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have
been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with
the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were
overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th
century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the
then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom
of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition
within the domain of knowledge.
“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical and
juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development.

But religion, morality philosophy, political science, and law, constantly
survived this change.”
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc. that are
common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it
abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a
new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical
experience.”
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society
has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that
assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past
ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder,
then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity
and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general
ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance
of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional
property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical
rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working
class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle
of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all
capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in
the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class;
and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of
despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of
bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear
economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the
movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old
social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the
mode of production.
These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty
generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to
public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a
national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the
hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the
State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of
the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies,
especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual
abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable
distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of
children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education
with industrial production, &c., &c.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared,
and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association
of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one
class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the
bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as
a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as
such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will,
along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the
existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby
have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class
antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development
of each is the condition for the free development of all.

III.
SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE

1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM
A. Feudal Socialism

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the
aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern
bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English
reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart.
Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether out of the question. A
literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature
the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight,
apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their indictment against
the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the
aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master,
and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half
echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and
incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but
always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the
march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the
proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it
joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and
deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

One section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited
this spectacle.
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the
bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances
and conditions that were quite different, and that are now antiquated. In
showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they
forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own
form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their
criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this,
that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed, which is
destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a
proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against
the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high falutin phrases,
they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry,
and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and
potato spirits.
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has
Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has
not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage,
against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and
poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother
Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest
consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the
bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and
perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The mediaeval
burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the
modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed,

industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side
with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a
new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between
proletariat and bourgeoisie and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part
of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are
being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of
competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment
approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section
of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures, agriculture and
commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half
of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat
against the bourgeoisie, should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois
regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the
standpoint of these intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the
working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the
head of this school, not only in France but also in England.
This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the
contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the
hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the
disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of
capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out
the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the
proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the
distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations,
the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old
nationalities.
In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to
restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the
old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern
means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old
property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those
means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture, patriarchal relations
in agriculture.

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating
effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of
the blues.

C. German, or “True,” Socialism

The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that
originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the
expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany
at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest
with feudal absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits, eagerly
seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings
immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not
immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this
French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumed a
purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth
century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than
the demands of “Practical Reason” in general, and the utterance of the will
of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes the law of
pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally.
The world of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new
French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or
rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic
point of view.
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language
is appropriated, namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over
the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had
been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane
French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the
French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic
functions of money, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity,” and beneath the
French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote “dethronement of the
Category of the General,” and so forth.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French
historical criticisms they dubbed “Philosophy of Action,” “True Socialism,”
“German Science of Socialism,” “Philosophical Foundation of Socialism,”
and so on.
The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely
emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the
struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome
“French one-sidedness” and of representing, not true requirements, but the
requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of
Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality,
who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and
solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such mountebank fashion,
meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the German, and especially, of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal
movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to “True” Socialism
of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of
hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative
government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press,
bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the
masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this
bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the
French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of
modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of
existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things
whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors,
country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the
threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with
which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German
working-class risings.
While this “True” Socialism thus served the governments as a weapon
for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly

represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German Philistines. In
Germany the petty bourgeois class, a relique of the sixteenth century, and
since then constantly cropping up again under various forms, is the real
social basis of the existing state of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in
Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie
threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the
concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary
proletariat. “True” Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one
stone. It spread like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric,
steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the
German Socialists wrapped their sorry “eternal truths,” all skin and bone,
served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a
public. And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its
own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois
Philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German
petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this
model man it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact
contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly
opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism, and of
proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With
very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications
that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and
enervating literature.

2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS,
SOCIALISM
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in
order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians,
improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity,
members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance

fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of
Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this
form.
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social
conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting
therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary
and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a
proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is
supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable
conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the
proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into
the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat
should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away
all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism
sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the
working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change
in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of
any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence,
this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the
bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by
a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence
of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations
between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the
administrative work, of bourgeois government.
Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when,
it becomes a mere figure of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the
benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working
class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois
Socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the
benefit of the working class.

3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND
COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern
revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as
the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in
times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown,
these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the
proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its
emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be
produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary
literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had
necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and
social levelling in its crudest form.
The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of Saint-
Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the early
undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat
and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well
as the action of the decomposing elements, in the prevailing form of
society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle
of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political
movement.
Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the
development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as
yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the
proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new
social laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically
created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual,
spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to the organisation of
society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself,
in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their
social plans.

In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for the
interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from
the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist
for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own
surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far
superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of
every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they
habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by
preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they
understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best
possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action;
they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small
experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to
pave the way for the new social Gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the
proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic
conception of its own position correspond with the first instinctive
yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.
But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical
element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full
of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class.
The practical measures proposed in them—such as the abolition of the
distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of
industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system,
the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the
State into a mere superintendence of production, all these proposals, point
solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time,
only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in
their earliest, indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals,
therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.
The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an
inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class
struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from
the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all

theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems
were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case,
formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their
masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the
proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the
class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of
experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated
“phalansteres,” of establishing “Home Colonies,” of setting up a “Little
Icaria”—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem—and to realise all these
castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of
the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary
conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more
systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the
miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the
working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind
unbelief in the new Gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively,
oppose the Chartists and the “Réformistes.”

IV.
POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN
RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING
OPPOSITION PARTIES

Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing
working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian
Reformers in America.
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the
enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the
movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of
that movement. In France the Communists ally themselves with the Social-
Democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving,
however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and
illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution.
In Switzerland they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact
that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic
Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as
the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented
the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.
In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a
revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy,
and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class
the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between
bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may
straightaway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social

and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce
along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary
classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately
begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that
country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried
out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a
much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the
seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the
bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately
following proletarian revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary
movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in
each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the
time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the
democratic parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly
declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all
existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic
revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

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