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Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO ***
Contents
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.
I.
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the
contending classes.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but
established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of
struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the
bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has
simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes,
directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the
earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the
bourgeoisie were developed.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was
taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle
class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial
armies, the modern bourgeois.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to
all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn
asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural
superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man
than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned
the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous
enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of
egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange
value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In
one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political
illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and
has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal
display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much
admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It
has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has
accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts,
and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the
shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It
has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population
as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of
the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the
country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and
semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of
peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state
of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has
agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.
The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation.
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate
interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped
together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one
national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The
bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created
more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all
preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man,
machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture,
steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole
continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations
conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment
that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
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.
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.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases
in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength
grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and
conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and
more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions
of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.
The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting
commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating.
The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing,
makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between
individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the
character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers
begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they
club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found
permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these
occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real
fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the
ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the
improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and
that place the workers of different localities in contact with one
another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the
numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national
struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political
struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle
Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern
proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the
process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within
the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character,
that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins
the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.
Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility
went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes
over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois
ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending
theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today,
the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other
classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the
proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle
class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the
peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from
extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are
therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are
reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by
chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their
impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their
present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint
to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass
thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be
swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of
life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of
reactionary intrigue.
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.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the
bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the
condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on
competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose
involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the
labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due
to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts
from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie
produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore,
produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory
of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
II.
PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat
as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most
advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every
country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other
hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat
the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the
conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian
movement.
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other
proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class,
overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by
the proletariat.
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.
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.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all
work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the
dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire
nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this
objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no
longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous
majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we
replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the
social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct
or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have
not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek
to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education
from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the
hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more
disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties
among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed
into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the
status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation
of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to
be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists
have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost
from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes,
take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they
have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political
supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must
constitute itself _the_ nation, it is, so far, itself national, though
not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and
more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom
of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of
production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production
is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of
its ruling class.
When 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.
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past
society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms,
antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past
ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No
wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all
the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common
forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the
total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional
property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most
radical rupture with traditional ideas.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the
working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as
to win the battle of democracy.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class
antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
III.
SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE
1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a
proletariat, as that it creates a _revolutionary_ proletariat.
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has
Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the
bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and
perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The mediaeval
burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the
modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed,
industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by
side with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than
half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the
proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use, in their criticism of
the bourgeois _regime_, the standard of the peasant and petty
bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes should
take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois
Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but
also in England.
The world of the German _literati_ consisted solely in bringing the new
French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience,
or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own
philosophic point of view.
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language
is appropriated, namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints
_over_ the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient
heathendom had been written. The German _literati_ reversed this
process with the profane French literature. They wrote their
philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance,
beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they
wrote “Alienation of Humanity,” and beneath the French criticism of the
bourgeois State they wrote “dethronement of the Category of the
General,” and so forth.
This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and
solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such mountebank
fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets
with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German
working-class risings.
While this “True” Socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for
fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly
represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German
Philistines. In Germany the _petty bourgeois_ class, a _relique_ of the
sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under
various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of
things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in
Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie
threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the
concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a
revolutionary proletariat. “True” Socialism appeared to kill these two
birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German
petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of
this model man it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation,
the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length
of directly opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism,
and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class
struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and
Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to
the domain of this foul and enervating literature.
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.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends,
made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being
overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then
undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the
economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be
produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone.
The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of
the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated
universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the
development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does
not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation
of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science,
after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.
IV.
POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING
OPPOSITION PARTIES
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the
enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the
movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the
future of that movement. In France the Communists ally themselves with
the Social-Democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie,
reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard
to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great
Revolution.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working
class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism
between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers
may straightaway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the
social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily
introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall
of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the
bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question
in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of
development at the time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the
democratic parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly
declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow
of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a
Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their
chains. They have a world to win.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO ***
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