The Communist Manifesto

                      by Karl Marx and Frederik Engels
                        Translated by Samuel Moore

[EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Marx's Ten Planks for the establishment of a communist state. 
* Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 
* A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 
* Abolition of all right of inheritance. 
* Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 
* Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital
		and an exclusive monopoly. 
* Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. 
* 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. 
* Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 
* Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between
		town and country by a more equable distribution of population over the country. 
* Free education for all children in public schools.  Abolition of children's factory labor in its
		present form. Combination of education with industrial production.


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 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.



CHAPTER I.



BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS.*



*By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the

means of social production, and employers of wage labour; by proletariat

the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of

their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.



The history of all hitherto existing society* is the history of class

struggles.



*That is, all written history. In 1837, the pre-history of society, the

social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but

unknown. Since then Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in

Russia; Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all

Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were

found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from

India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic

society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery

of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the

dissolution of these primaeval communities society begins to be

differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have

attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in The Origin of the

Family, Private Property and the State.



Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-masters*

and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant

opposition to one another, carried on an Uninterrupted, now hidden, now

open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary

reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending

classes.



*Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a

head of a guild.



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 colonization of America, trade

with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities

generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never

before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering

feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, in

which industrial production was monopolized 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 aside 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

revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by

the giant, modern industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by

industrial millionaires- the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern

bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world 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 turn, 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, it became 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.



*"Commune" was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before

they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local

self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate." Generally

speaking, for the economic development of the bourgeoisie, England is here

taken as the typical country; for its political development, France.



The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history. The

bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all

feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the

motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left

no other bond 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 indefeasible chartered

freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom- Free Trade. In one

word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has

substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie

has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto 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 reactionaries so much admire found its fitting complement

in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's

activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing

Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted

expeditions that put in the shade all former migrations of nations and

crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing

the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and

with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of

production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of

existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of

production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting

uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier

ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and

venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away; all new-formed ones

become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts in air,

all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with

sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the

bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,

settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has

through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character

to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of

reactionaries it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national

ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been

destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new

industries whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all

civilized nations; by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw

material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose

products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we

find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant

lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and

self-sufficiency we have intercourse in every direction, universal

inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual

production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common

property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more

impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there

arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all

instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of

communication, draws all nations, even the most barbarian, into

civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery

with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the

barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It

compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of

production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into

their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a

world after its own image. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the

rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased

the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a

considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as

it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian

and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of

peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. More and more the

bourgeoisie keeps doing away with the scattered state of the population, of

the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population,

centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few

hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization.

Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests,

laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one

nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest,

one frontier and one customs tariff. The bourgeoisie during its rule of

scarce one hundred years has created more massive and more colossal

productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection

of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry

and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing

of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole

populations conjured out of the ground- what earlier century had even a

presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social

labour? We see, then, that the means of production and of exchange which

served as the foundation for the growth of the bourgeoisie were generated

in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of

production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society

produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and

manufacturing industry, in a 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 economic and political

sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own

eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of

exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic

means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer

able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his

spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but

the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern

conditions of production, against the property relations that are the

conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is

enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put

the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial, each time more

threateningly. In these crises a great part not only of the existing

products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are

periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that,

in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity- the epidemic of

over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of

momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of

devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry

and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much

civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much

commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend

to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the

contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they

are fettered, and no sooner do they overcome these fetters than they bring

disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of

bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to

comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over

these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of

productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets and by the

more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the

way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the

means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie

felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie

itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring

death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield

those weapons- the modern working class, the proletarians. In proportion as

the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the

proletariat, the modern working class, developed- a class of 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

piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are

consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the

fluctuations of the market. Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to

division of 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

organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed

under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not

only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and of the bourgeois state;

they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, 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 develops- 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 has the

labourer received his wages in cash, for the moment escaping exploitation

by the manufacturer, 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, and

retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants- all these

sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive

capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried

on and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly

because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of

production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the

population. The proletariat goes through various stages of development.

With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the

contest is carried on by individual 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 machinery to pieces, 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,

still able to do so for a time. 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

equalized, 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 (trade unions) against the bourgeoisie; 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 furthered by the improved means of communication which are

created by modern industry, and which place the workers of different

localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was

needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same

character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class

struggle is a political struggle. And that union, which the burghers of the

Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries to attain,

the modern proletarians, thanks to railways achieve in a few years. This

organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a

political party, is continually being upset again by the competition

between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger,

firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular

interests of the workers by taking advantage of the divisions among the

bourgeoisie itself. Thus the Ten Hour bill in England was carried.

Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further the

course of development of the proletariat in many ways. 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 elements of political and general

education; in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for

fighting the bourgeoisie. Further, as we have already seen, entire sections

of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into

the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of

existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of

enlightenment and progress. Finally, in times when the class struggle nears

the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling

class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a

violent, glaring character that a small section of the ruling class cuts

itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the

future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period a section of

the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the

bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of

the bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of

comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. Of all the

classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie 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 adopt that

of the proletariat. The "dangerous class," the social scum

(Lumpenproletariat), 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. The social

conditions of the old society no longer exist for the proletariat. The

proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has

no longer anything in common with 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 interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the

self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the

interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of

our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole

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 labourer, 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 overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent

to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot

help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of

being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in

other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. The

essential condition for the existence and 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

labourers. 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 are its own grave-diggers. Its

fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.



CHAPTER II.



PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS.



In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class

parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the

proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of

their own by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. The

Communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this

only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different

countries they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the

entire proletariat, independently of all nationality; 2. In the various

stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the

bourgeoisie has to pass through they always and everywhere represent the

interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists, therefore, are on the

one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the

working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward

all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass

of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of

march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian

movement. The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all

the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class,

overthrow of 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's 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 to keep the labourer 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 insofar 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

Communist 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 a 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: there can no longer

be any wage labour when there is no longer any capital. All objections

urged against the Communist mode of producing and appropriating material

products have in the same way been urged against the Communist 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 yourjurisprudence is

but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential

character and direction are determined by the economic 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 of society,

direct or indirect, 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 claptrap 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 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 vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the

development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world

market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of

life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause

them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized

countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of

the proletariat. In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by

another 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 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, "religion, 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 class, to establish

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 obligation of all to work. 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 child factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with

industrial production, etc. When in the course of development class

distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in

the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will

lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is

merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the

proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled by the

force of circumstances to organize itself as a class; if by means of a

revolution it makes itself the ruling class and, as such, sweeps away by

force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these

conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class

antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its

own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its

classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the

free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.



CHAPTER 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 struggle 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.



*Not the English Restoration, 1660 to 1689, but the French Restoration,

1814 to 1830.



In order to arouse sympathy the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight,

apparently, of its own interests and to formulate its indictment against

the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus

the aristocracy took its revenge by singing lampoons against its 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, as 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 highfalutin 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.*



*This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and

squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own

account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar

manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British

aristocrats are as yet rather above that; but they, too, know how to make

up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters of more or less

shady joint-stock companies.



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 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 labour, the concentration of capital and land in

a few hands, over-production 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 men of letters 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 18th 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 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, who 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. 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 risings of the

German working class. While this "True" Socialism thus served the

governments as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie it at the same

time directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the

German Philistines. In Germany the petty bourgeois class, a relic of the

16th century, and since then constantly cropping up again under various

various forms 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 increase wonderfully the sale of their goods

amongst such a public. And on its part, German Socialism recognized 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 his 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, organizers 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 Philosophy of Poverty 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. These are the last words and the only

seriously meant words of bourgeois Socialism. It is summed up in the

phrase: the bourgeois are 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-

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 St. 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 such Socialists 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 organization of the proletariat to an

organization 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 writings

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;

abolition of the family, of private gain 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 recognized 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 realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated

phalansteres, of establishing "Home Colonies," or setting up a "Little

Icaria"*- pocket editions of the New Jerusalem- and to realize 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.



*Phalansteres were socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier;

Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his Utopia, and, later on, to his

American Communist colony.



They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the

working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind

unbelief in the new gospel. The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in

France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.



CHAPTER 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.



*The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by

Louis Blanc, in the daily press by the Reforme. The name of

Social-Democracy signifies, with these its inventors, a section of the

Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with Socialism.



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 instill into the working class the clearest possible

recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat,

in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons

against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the

bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in

order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight

against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin. The Communists turn

their attention chiefly to Germany because that country is on the eve of a

bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced

conditions of European civilization and with a much more developed

proletariat than what existed in England in the 17th and in France in the

18th 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 case 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 Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to

lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all

countries, unite!



-THE END-

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