Manifesto of the

Communist Party
By
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

- 2008 -

Open Source Socialist Publishing

Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

K. Marx & F. Engels: 1847.

First published in February 1848.
Authorized English translation published in 1888 by William Reeves,
185 Fleet Street, E.C.

This edition: Open Source Socialist Publishing, Utrecht, 2008

Source: Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume One, Progress
Publishers, Moscow, USSR, 1969, pp. 98-137.
Trans. by Samuel Moore with annotations by Friederich Engels, 1888
CONTENTS

1. Bourgeois And Proletarians

2. Proletarians And Communists

3. Socialist And Communist Literature:

1. Reactionary Socialism
a. Feudal Socialism
b. Petty Bourgeois Socialism
c. German Or “True” Socialism
2. Conservative Or Bourgeoise Socialism
3. Critical-Utopian Socialism And
Communism

4. Position Of The Communists In Relation

To Various Existing Opposition Parties

Appendix
Notes
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 Tsar,
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.

5
Bourgeois1 and Proletarians

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of

class struggles2.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,

guild-master3 and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and
oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another,
carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,
a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of
the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere

a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a
manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we
have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle
Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,
apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again,
subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the

ruins of feudal society has not done away with class
antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new
conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of
the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses,

6
however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class
antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting
up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered

burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the
first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of 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, in 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 manufacturer 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 the whole
industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

7
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, an armed and self-governing association in the
medieval commune4: here independent urban republic (as
in Italy and Germany); there taxable "third estate" of the
monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of
manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or
the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the
nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies
in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the
establishment of Modern Industry and of the world
market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative
State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern
state is but a committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most

revolutionary part.

8
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
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 Exoduses of
nations and crusades.

9
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 entire 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

10
place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the
country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction
the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the
old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we
have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-
dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in
intellectual production. The intellectual creations of
individual nations become common property. National
one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and
more impossible, and from the numerous national and
local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all

instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated
means of communication, draws all, even the most
barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of
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.

11
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the
scattered state of the population, of the means of
production, and of property. It has agglomerated
population, centralised the means of 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 or rivers,
whole populations conjured out of the ground - what
earlier century had even a presentiment that such
productive forces slumbered in the lap of social 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.

12
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by
a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the
economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production,
of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up
such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like
the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of
the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For
many a decade past the history of industry and commerce
is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces
against modern conditions of production, against the
property relations that are the conditions for the existence
of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention
the commercial crises that by their periodical return put
the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial,
each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part
not only of the existing products, but also of the previously
created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In
these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all
earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the
epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself
put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears
as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off
the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and
commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there
is too much 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

13
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 the

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

14
it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most
easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the
cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost
entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for
maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the
price of a commodity, and therefore also of 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 the increase of the work exacted in a
given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the

patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial
capitalist. Masses of 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
overlooker, 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.

15
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, 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
specialised 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
operative 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

16
own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie,
which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is
compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is
moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage,
therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but
the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute
monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois,
the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement
is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every
victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not

only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in
greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that
strength more. The various interests and conditions of life
within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more
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
increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly
developing, makes their livelihood more and more
precarious; the collisions between individual workmen
and individual bourgeois take more and more the
character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon,
the workers begin to form combinations (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

17
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
proletarian, 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
time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these
battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat,
to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena.
The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat
with its own elements of political and general education,
in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons
for fighting the bourgeoisie.

18
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the
ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated
into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their
conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat
with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive

hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the
ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society,
assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small
section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the
revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its
hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of
the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion
of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in
particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have
raised themselves to the level of comprehending
theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the

bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a 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 only so in view
of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus
defend not their present, but their future interests, they

19
desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of
the proletariat.

The "dangerous class", [lumpenproletariat] the social

scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest
layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into
the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions
of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed
tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at

large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is
without property; his relation to his wife and children has
no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family
relations; modern industry 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

20
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
the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a
bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead
of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and
deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class.
He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more
rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes
evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the
ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of
existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to
rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its

21
slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him
sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of
being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this
bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer
compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway
of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation
of capital; the condition for 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 the revolutionary
combination, due to association. The development of
Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the
very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and
appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and
the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

22
Proletarians and Communists

In what relation do the Communists stand to the

proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a
separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of

the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by

which to shape and 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

23
working-class parties of every country, that section which
pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically,
they have over the great mass of the proletariat the
advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the
conditions, and the ultimate general results of the
proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that

of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat
into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy,
conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no

way based on ideas or principles that have been invented,
or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations

springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical
movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of
existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature
of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been

subject to historical change consequent upon the change
in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal

property in 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

24
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 petty artisan and of the small
peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois
form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of
industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is
still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-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

25
members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common

property, into the property of all members of society,
personal property is not thereby transformed into social
property. It is only the social character of the property that
is changed. It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage-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
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

26
individuality, while the living person is dependent and has
no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the

bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And
rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality,
bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is
undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois

conditions of production, free trade, free selling and
buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and
buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and
buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeois
about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in
contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the
fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning
when opposed to the 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.

27
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 appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private
property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will
overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have

gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those 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 mode
of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just
as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is
the disappearance of production itself, so the

28
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, &c. 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 [Aufhebung] 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

29
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 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, &c.? 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 parents and child,
becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action
of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the
proletarians are torn asunder, and their children
transformed into simple articles of commerce and
instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of

women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of

production. He hears that the instruments of production

30
are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to
no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all
will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is

to do away with the status of women as mere instruments
of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous

indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women
which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially
established by the Communists. The Communists have no
need to introduce community of women; it has existed
almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and

daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to
speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in
seducing each other's wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in

common and thus, at the most, what the Communists
might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to
introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed,
an openly 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

31
them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must
first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the
leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the
nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the
bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are

daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development
of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world
market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in
the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to

vanish still faster. United action, of the leading 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 will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one
nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion
as the antagonism between classes within the nation
vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come
to an end.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a

philosophical and, generally, from an ideological
standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's

ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man's
consciousness, changes with every change in the
conditions of his material existence, in his social relations
and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that

32
intellectual production changes its character in proportion
as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of
each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society,

they do but express that fact that within the old society the
elements of a new one have been created, and that the
dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the
dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient
religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian
ideas succumbed in the 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

33
different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is
common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part
of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social
consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and
variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or
general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with
the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture

with traditional relations; no wonder that its development
involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to

Communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by

the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position
of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by

degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to 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 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.

34
These measures will, of course, be different in different
countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following

will be pretty generally applicable:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all

rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and
rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the banks 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 work. Establishment of
industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing
industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between
town and country by a more equable distribution of the
populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.
Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form.
Combination of education with industrial production, &c,
&c.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions

35
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.

36
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[A], 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.5

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to

lose sight, apparently, of its 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 masters and whispering in his ears sinister
prophesies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half

lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the

37
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 bourgeois amounts to this, that under the
bourgeois régime 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,

38
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.6

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 medieval
burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the
precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries
which are but little developed, industrially and
commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side
with the rising bourgeoisie.

In countries where modern 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

39
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
régime, 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

40
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 hangover.

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 expressions 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 (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
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 laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be,

41
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

42
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 a mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost
its pedantic innocence.

The fight of the Germans, 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 those 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.

43
It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and
bullets, with which these same governments, just at that
time, dosed the German working-class risings.

While this "True" Socialism thus served the government as

a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the
same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the
interest of German Philistines. In Germany, the petty-
bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since
then constantly cropping up again under the 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

44
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.7

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 Philosophis 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

45
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 economical 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 affected
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.

46
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 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

47
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 an organisation of society
especially 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 the
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, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the

48
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
function of the state into a more 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,

49
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", or setting up a "Little
Icaria"8 - 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 [or]
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 Reformists.

50
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 with the
Social-Democrats9 against the conservative and radical
bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a
critical position in regard to phases 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.

51
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 civilisation and with a
much more developed proletariat than that of England
was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth
century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany
will be but the prelude to an immediately following
proletarian revolution.

In short, the Communists everywhere support every

revolutionary movement against the existing social and
political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the

leading question in each, the property question, no matter
what its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and

agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

52
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!

53
Appendix: Prefaces To Various Language Editions

The 1872 German Edition

The Communist League, an international association of

workers, which could of course be only a secret one, under
conditions obtaining at the time, commissioned us, the
undersigned, at the Congress held in London in November
1847, to write for publication a detailed theoretical and
practical programme for the Party. Such was the origin of
the following Manifesto, the manuscript of which travelled
to London to be printed a few weeks before the February
Revolution. First published in German, it has been
republished in that language in at least twelve different
editions in Germany, England, and America. It was
published in English for the first time in 1850 in the Red
Republican, London, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane,
and in 1871 in at least three different translations in
America. The french version first appeared in Paris shortly
before the June insurrection of 1848, and recently in Le
Socialiste of New York. A new translation is in the course
of preparation. A Polish version appeared in London
shortly after it was first published in Germany. A Russian
translation was published in Geneva in the 'sixties. Into
Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its appearance.

However much that state of things may have altered

during the last twenty-five years, the general principles
laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct
today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be
improved. The practical application of the principles will
depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at
all times, on the historical conditions for the time being

54
existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on
the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section
II. That passage would, in many respects, be very
differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of
Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying
improved and extended organization of the working class,
in view of the practical experience gained, first in the
February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris
Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held
political power for two whole months, this programme has
in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was
proved by the Commune, viz., that "the working class
cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and
wield it for its own purposes." (See The Civil War in
France: Address of the General Council of the
International Working Men's Assocation, 1871, where this
point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that
the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to
the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also
that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the
various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in
principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated,
because the political situation has been entirely changed,
and the progress of history has swept from off the earth
the greater portion of the political parties there
enumerated.
But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document
which we have no longer any right to alter. A subsequent
edition may perhaps appear with an introduction bridging
the gap from 1847 to the present day; but this reprint was
too unexpected to leave us time for that.

Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels

London, June 24, 1872

55
The 1882 Russian Edition

The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the

Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was published
early in the 'sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol.
Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the
Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be
impossible today.

What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at

that time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the
last section: the position of the Communists in relation to
the various opposition parties in various countries.
Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It
was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve
of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed
the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through
immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw
materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of
its industrial products. Both were, therefore, in one way of
another, pillars of the existing European system.

How very different today. Precisely European immigration

fitted North American for a gigantic agricultural
production, whose competition is shaking the very
foundations of European landed property -- large and
small. At the same time, it enabled the United States to
exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy
and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial
monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England,
existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a
revolutionary manner upon America itself. Step by step,
the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the
basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to

56
the competition of giant farms; at the same time, a mass
industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration of
capital funds are developing for the first time in the
industrial regions.

And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not

only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as
well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just
beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was
proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a
prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia
forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.

The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the

proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of
modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-
face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and
bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than
half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the
question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly
undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of
land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist
common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass
through the same process of dissolution such as
constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the

Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian
revolution in the West, so that both complement each
other, the present Russian common ownership of land may
serve as the starting point for a communist development.

Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels

January 21, 1882, London

57
The 1883 German Edition

The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone.

Marx, the man to whom the whole working class class of
Europe and America owes more than to any one else --
rests at Highgate Cemetary and over his grave the first
grass is already growing. Since his death [March 13, 1883],
there can be even less thought of revising or
supplementing the Manifesto. But I consider it all the
more necessary again to state the following expressly:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto -- that

economic production, and the structure of society of every
historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute
the foundation for the political and intellectual history of
that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution
of the primaeval communal ownership of land) all history
has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between
exploited and exploiting, between dominated and
dominating classes at various stages of social evolution;
that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where
the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no
longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and
oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time
forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation,
oppression, class struggles -- this basic thought belongs
soley and exclusively to Marx.10

I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is

it necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto
itself.

Fredrick Engels
June 28, 1883, London

58
The 1888 English Edition

The Manifesto was published as the platform of the

Communist League, a working men's association, first
exclusively German, later on international, and under the
political conditions of the Continent before 1848,
unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League,
held in November 1847, Marx and Engels were
commissioned to prepare a complete theoretical and
practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in
January 1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in
London a few weeks before the French Revolution of
February 24. A French translation was brought out in Paris
shortly before the insurrection of June 1848. The first
English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared
in George Julian Harney's Red Republican, London, 1850. A
Danish and a Polish edition had also been published.

The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 -- the

first great battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie --
drove again into the background, for a time, the social and
political aspirations of the European working class.
Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was, again, as it
had been before the Revolution of February, solely
between different sections of the propertied class; the
working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-
room, and to the position of extreme wing of the middle-
class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian
movements continued to show signs of life, they were
ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted
out the Central Board of the Communist League, then
located in Cologne. The members were arrested and, after
eighteen months' imprisonment, they were tried in
October 1852. This celebrated "Cologne Communist Trial"

59
lasted from October 4 till November 12; seven of the
prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a
fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately after
the sentence, the League was formlly dissolved by the
remaining members. As to the Manifesto, it seemed
henceforth doomed to oblivion.

When the European workers had recovered sufficient

strength for another attack on the ruling classes, the
International Working Men's Association sprang up. But
this association, formed with the express aim of welding
into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and
America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid
down in the Manifesto. The International was bound to
have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the
English trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in
France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans in
Germany.11

Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of

all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development
of the working class, which was sure to result from
combined action and mutual discussion. The very events
and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats
even more than the victories, could not help bringing
home to men's minds the insufficiency of their various
favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more
complete insight into the true conditions for working-class
emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on
its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men
from what it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France,
Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the
conservative English trade unions, though most of them
had long since severed their connection with the

60
International, were gradually advancing towards that point
at which, last year at Swansea, their president could say in
their name: "Continental socialism has lost its terror for
us." In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made
considerable headway among the working men of all
countries.

The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since

1850, the German text had been reprinted several times in
Switzerland, England, and America. In 1872, it was
translated into English in New York, where the translation
was published in Woorhull and Claflin's Weekly. From this
English version, a French one was made in Le Socialiste of
New York. Since then, at least two more English
translations, more or less mutilated, have been brought
out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in
England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin,
was published at Herzen's Kolokol office in Geneva, about
1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulich, also in
Geneva, in 1882. A new Danish edition is to be found in
Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh
French translation in Le Socialiste, Paris, 1886. From this
latter, a Spanish version was prepared and published in
Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted;
there have been twelve altogether at the least. An
Armenian translation, which was to be published in
Constantinople some months ago, did not see the light, I
am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a
book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator
declined to call it his own production. Of further
translations into other languages I have heard but had not
seen. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects the history
of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is
doubtless the most wide spread, the most international

61
production of all socialist literature, the common platform
acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to
California.

Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a

socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood,
on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian
systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both
of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and
gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most
multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering,
professed to redress, without any danger to capital and
profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men
outside the working-class movement, and looking rather
to the "educated" classes for support. Whatever portion of
the working class had become convinced of the
insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had
proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called
itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely
instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the
cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the
working class to produce the Utopian communism of
Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany. Thus, in
1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism
a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the
Continent at least, "respectable"; communism was the very
opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was
that "the emancipation of the workers must be the act of
the working class itself," there could be no doubt as to
which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have,
ever since, been far from repudiating it.

The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider

myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition

62
which forms the nucleus belongs to Marx. That
proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the
prevailing mode of economic production and exchange,
and the social organization necessarily following from it,
form the basis upon which it is built up, and from that
which alone can be explained the political and intellectual
history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history
of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal
society, holding land in common ownership) has been a
history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and
exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; That the history of
these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which,
nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited
and oppressed class -- the proletariat -- cannot attain its
emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling
class -- the bourgeoisie -- without, at the same time, and
once and for all, emancipating society at large from all
exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and class
struggles.

This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do

for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we
both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years
before 1845. How far I had independently progressed
towards it is best shown by my Conditions of the Working
Class in England. But when I again met Marx at Brussels,
in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it
before me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have
stated it here.

From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I

quote the following:

"However much that state of things may have altered

63
during the last twenty-five years, the general principles
laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct
today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be
improved. The practical application of the principles will
depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at
all times, on the historical conditions for the time being
existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on
the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section
II. That passage would, in many respects, be very
differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of
Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying
improved and extended organization of the working class,
in view of the practical experience gained, first in the
February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris
Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held
political power for two whole months, this programme has
in some details been antiquated.
One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz.,
that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-
made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes."
(See The Civil War in France: Address of the General
Council of the International Working Men's Assocation
1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is
self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is
deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes
down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of
the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section
IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are
antiquated, because the political situation has been
entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept
from off the Earth the greater portion of the political
parties there enumerated.

"But then, the Manifesto has become a historical

64
document which we have no longer any right to alter."

The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the

translator of the greater portion of Marx's Capital. We have
revised it in common, and I have added a few notes
explanatory of historical allusions.

Fredrick Engels
January 30, 1888, London

The 1890 German Edition

Since [The 1883 German edition preface] was written, a

new German edition of the Manifesto has again become
necessary, and much has also happened to the Manifesto
which should be recorded here.

A second Russian translation --by Vera Zasulich--

appeared in Geneva in 1882; the preface to that edition was
written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately, the original
German manuscript has gone astray; I must therefore
retranslate from the Russian which will in no way improve
the text. It reads:

[ Reprint of the 1882 Russian Edition ]

At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in

Geneva: Manifest Kommunistyczny.

Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in

the Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885.
Unfortunately, it is not quite complete; certain essential
passages, which seem to have presented difficulties to the

65
translator, have been omitted, and, in addition, there are
signs of carelessness here and there, which are all the more
unpleasantly conspicuous since the translation indicates
that had the translator taken a little more pains, he would
have done an excellent piece of work.

A new French version appeared in 1886, in Le Socialiste of

Paris; it is the best published to date.

From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same

year in El Socialista of Madrid, and then reissued in
pamphlet form: Manifesto del Partido Communista por
Carlos Marx y F. Engels, Madrid, Administracion de El
Socialista, Hernan Cortes.

As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the

manuscript of an Armenian translation was offered to a
publisher in Constantinople. But the good man did not
have the courage to publish something bearing the name
of Marx and suggested that the translator set down his
own name as author, which the latter however declined.

After one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate

American translations had been repeatedly reprinted in
England, an authentic version at last appeared in 1888.
This was my friend Samuel Moore, and we went through it
together once more before it went to press. It is entitled:
Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels. Authorized English translation, edited
and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, London, William
Reeves, 185 Fleet Street, E.C. I have added some of the
notes of that edition to the present one.

The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with

66
enthusiasm, at the time of its appearance, by the not at all
numerous vanguard of scientific socialism (as is proved by
the translations mentioned in the first place), it was soon
forced into the background by the reaction that began
with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was
finally excommunicated "by law" in the conviction of the
Cologne Communists in November 1852. With the
disappearance from the public scene of the workers'
movement that had begun with the February Revolution,
the Manifesto too passed into the background.

When the European workers had again gathered sufficient

strength for a new onslaught upon the power of the ruling
classes, the International Working Men's Association came
into being. Its aim was to weld together into one huge
army the whole militant working class of Europe and
America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles
laid down in the Manifesto. It was bound to have a
programme which would not shut the door on the English
trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish
Proudhonists, and the German Lassalleans. This
programme --the considerations underlying the Statutes of
the International -- was drawn up by Marx with a master
hand acknowledged even by the Bakunin and the
anarchists. For the ultimate final triumph of the ideas set
forth in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon the
intellectual development of the working class, as it
necessarily has to ensue from united action and
discussion. The events and vicissitudes in the struggle
against capital, the defeats even more than the successes,
could not but demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy
of their former universal panaceas, and make their minds
more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true
conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was

67
right. The working class of 1874, at the dissolution of the
International, was altogether different from that of 1864, at
its foundation. Proudhonism in the Latin countries, and
the specific Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out; and
even the ten arch-conservative English trade unions were
gradually approaching the point where, in 1887, the
chairman of their Swansea Congress could say in their
name: "Continental socialism has lost its terror for us." Yet
by 1887 continental socialism was almost exclusively the
theory heralded in the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent,
the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the
modern working-class movement since 1848. At present, it
is doubtless the most widely circulated, the most
international product of all socialist literature, the
common programme of many millions of workers of all
countries from Siberia to California.

Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it

a socialist manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were
considered socialists. On the one hand were the adherents
of the various utopian systems, notably the Owenites in
England and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at
that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually
dying out. On the other, the manifold types of social
quacks who wanted to eliminate social abuses through
their various universal panaceas and all kinds of patch-
work, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In
both cases, people who stood outside the labour
movement and who looked for support rather to the
"educated" classes. The section of the working class,
however, which demanded a radical reconstruction of
society, convinced that mere political revolutions were not
enough, then called itself Communist. It was still a rough-
hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude

68
communism. Yet, it was powerful enough to bring into
being two systems of utopian communism -- in France, the
"Icarian" communists of Cabet, and in Germany that of
Weitling. Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois
movement, communism a working-class movement.
Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite respectable,
whereas communism was the very opposite. And since we
were very decidely of the opinion as early as then that "the
emancipation of the workers must be the task of the
working class itself," we could have no hesitation as to
which of the two names we should choose. Nor has it ever
occured to us to repudiate it.

"Working men of all countries, unite!" But few voices

responded when we proclaimed these words to the world
42 years ago, on the eve of the first Paris Revolution in
which the proletariat came out with the demands of its
own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of
most of the Western European countries joined hands in
the International Working Men's Association of glorious
memory. True, the International itself lived only nine
years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all
countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than
ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because
today, as I write these lines, the European and American
proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for
the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for
one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day
to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the
Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by
the Paris Workers' Congress of 1889. And today's spectacle
will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all
countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all
countries are united indeed.

69
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own
eyes!

Fredrick Engels
May 1, 1890, London

The 1892 Polish Edition

The fact that a new Polish edition of the Communist

Manifesto has become necessary gives rise to various
thoughts.

First of all, it is noteworthy that of late the Manifesto has

become an index, as it were, of the development of large-
scale industry on the European continent. In proportion as
large-scale industry expands in a given country, the
demand grows among the workers of that country for
enlightenment regarding their position as the working
class in relation to the possessing classes, the socialist
movement spreads among them and the demand for the
Manifesto increases. Thus, not only the state of the labour
movement but also the degree of development of large-
scale industry can be measured with fair accuracy in every
country by the number of copies of the Manifesto
circulated in the language of that country.

Accordingly, the new Polish edition indicates a decided

progress of Polish industry. And there can be no doubt
whatever that this progress since the previous edition
published ten years ago has actually taken place. Russian
Poland, Congress Poland, has become the big industrial
region of the Russian Empire. Whereas Russian large-scale

70
industry is scattered sporadically - a part round the Gulf of
Finland, another in the center (Moscow and Vladimir), a
third along the coasts of the Black and Azov seas, and still
others elsewhere - Polish industry has been packed into a
relatively small area and enjoys both the advantages and
disadvantages arising from such concentration. The
competing Russian manufacturers acknowledged the
advantages when they demanded protective tariffs against
Poland, in spit of their ardent desire to transform the Poles
into Russians. The disadvantages - for the Polish
manufacturers and the Russian government - are manifest
in the rapid spread of socialist ideas among the Polish
workers and in the growing demand for the Manifesto.

But the rapid development of Polish industry, outstripping

that of Russia, is in its turn a new proof of the
inexhaustible vitality of the Polish people and a new
guarantee of its impending national restoration. And the
restoration of an independent and strong Poland is a
matter which concerns not only the Poles but all of us. A
sincere international collaboration of the European
nations is possible only if each of these nations is fully
autonomous in its own house. The Revolution of 1848,
which under the banner of the proletariat, after all, merely
let the proletarian fighters do the work of the bourgeoisie,
also secured the independence of Italy, Germany and
Hungary through its testamentary executors, Louis
Bonaparte and Bismarck; but Poland, which since 1792 had
done more for the Revolution than all these three together,
was left to its own resources when it succumbed in 1863 to
a tenfold greater Russian force. The nobility could neither
maintain nor regain Polish independence; today, to the
bourgeoisie, this independence is, to say the last,
immaterial. Nevertheless, it is a necessity for the

71
harmonious collaboration of the European nations. It can
be gained only by the young Polish proletariat, and in its
hands it is secure. For the workers of all the rest of Europe
need the independence of Poland just as much as the
Polish workers themselves.

F. Engels
London, February 10, 1892

The 1893 Italian Edition

Publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party

coincided, one may say, with March 18, 1848, the day of the
revolution in Milan and Berlin, which were armed
uprisings of the two nations situated in the center, the one,
of the continent of Europe, the other, of the
Mediterranean; two nations until then enfeebled by
division and internal strife, and thus fallen under foreign
domination. While Italy was subject to the Emperor of
Austria, Germany underwent the yoke, not less effective
though more indirect, of the Tsar of all the Russias. The
consequences of March 18, 1848, freed both Italy and
Germany from this disgrace; if from 1848 to 1871 these two
great nations were reconstituted and somehow again put
on their own, it was as Karl Marx used to say, because the
men who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were,
nevertheless, its testamentary executors in spite of
themselves.

Everywhere that revolution was the work of the working

class; it was the latter that built the barricades and paid
with its lifeblood. Only the Paris workers, in overthrowing
the government, had the very definite intention of

72
overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But conscious though
they were of the fatal antagonism existing between their
own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither the economic
progress of the country nor the intellectual development
of the mass of French workers had as yet reached the stage
which would have made a social reconstruction possible.
In the final analysis, therefore, the fruits of the revolution
were reaped by the capitalist class. In the other countries,
in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, the workers, from the very
outset, did nothing but raise the bourgeoisie to power. But
in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible
without national independence Therefore, the Revolution
of 1848 had to bring in its train the unity and autonomy of
the nations that had lacked them up to then: Italy,
Germany, Hungary. Poland will follow in turn.

Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist

revolution, it paved the way, prepared the ground for the
latter. Through the impetus given to large-scaled industry
in all countries, the bourgeois regime during the last forty-
five years has everywhere created a numerous,
concentrated and powerful proletariat. It has thus raised,
to use the language of the Manifesto, its own grave-
diggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each
nation, it will be impossible to achieve the international
union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-
operation of these nations toward common aims. Just
imagine joint international action by the Italian,
Hungarian, German, Polish and Russian workers under the
political conditions preceding 1848!

The battles fought in 1848 were thus not fought in vain.

Nor have the forty-five years separating us from that
revolutionary epoch passed to no purpose. The fruits are

73
ripening, and all I wish is that the publication of this
Italian translation may augur as well for the victory of the
Italian proletariat as the publication of the original did for
the international revolution.
The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part
played by capitalism in the past. The first capitalist nation
was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the
opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a
colossal figured: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the
Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as
in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. Will Italy give
us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this
new, proletarian era?

Fredrick Engels
London, February 1, 1893

74
Notes

1
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. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
2
That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the
social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but
unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered
common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von 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 organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid
bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning
discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe.
With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be
differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have
attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels,
1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence
omitted)]

3
Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a
head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

4
This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen
of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial
rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German
edition]

"Commune" was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even
before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local
self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally
speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England
is here taken as the typical country, for its political development,
France. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

[A] A reference to the movement for a reform of the electoral law which,

75
under the pressure of the working class, was pased by the British House
of Commons in 1831 and finally endorsed by the House of Lords in June,
1832. The reform was directed against monopoly rule of the landed and
finance aristrocracy and opened the way to Parliament for the
representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. Neither workers nor the
petty-bourgeois were allowed electoral rights, despite assurances they
would. [Editor's note]

5
Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French Restoration
(1814-1830). [Engels, 1888 German edition]

6
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
aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to
make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more
or less shady joint-stock companies. [Engels, 1888 German edition]

7
The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby
tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to dabble in socialism.
The chief representative and classical type of this tendency is Mr Karl
Gruen. [Engels, 1888 German edition]
8
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. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

"Home Colonies" were what Owen called his Communist model

societies. Phalansteres was the name of the public palaces planned by
Fourier. Icaria was the name given to the Utopian land of fancy, whose
Communist institutions Cabet portrayed. [Engels, 1890 German
Edition]

9
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.
[Engels, English Edition 1888]

76
10
"This proposition", I wrote in the preface to the English translation,
"which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's
theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually
approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently
progressed towards it is best shown by my Conditions of the Working
Class in England. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845,
he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms almost as
clear as those in which I have stated it here."]

11
Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a
disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto.
But in his first public agitation, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond
demanding co-operative workshops supported by state credit.

77