>>MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre
of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered
into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich
and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the party in opposition that has
not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition
that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism,
against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against
its reactionary adversaries? Two things result from this fact. I. Communism is already acknowledged by all
European Powers to be itself a Power. II. It is high time that Communists should openly,
in the face of the whole world, publish their views,
their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of
the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself. To this end, Communists of various nationalities
have assembled in London, and sketched the following
Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German,
Italian, Flemish and Danish languages. I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS The history of all hitherto existing societies
is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian,
lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor
and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another,
carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,
a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution
of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find
almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various
orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have
patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages,
feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,
serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate
gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted
from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class
antagonisms. It
has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,
new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the
epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive
feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a
whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps,
into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie
and Proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the
chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements
of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of
the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and
Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with
the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to
industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the
revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid
development. The feudal system of industry, under which
industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer
sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took
its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side
by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour
between the different corporate guilds vanished in the
face of division of labour in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the
demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and
machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of
the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the
leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world-market,
for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an
immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication
by land. This development has, in its time, reacted
on the extension of industry; and in proportion as
industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same
proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital,
and pushed into the background every class handed down from the
Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie
is itself the product of a long course of development, of
a series of revolutions in the modes of production and
of exchange. Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie
was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that
class. An
oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an
armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune;
here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany),
there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France),
afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either
the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise
against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great
monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the
establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market,
conquered for itself, in the modern representative State,
exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is
but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played
a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper
hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to
his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus
between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash
payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies
of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm,
of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It
has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of
the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that
single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every
occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent
awe. It has
converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the
man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family
its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation
to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came
to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages,
which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement
in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity
can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing
Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals;
it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade
all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly
revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby
the relations of production, and with them the whole relations
of society. Conservation of the old modes of production
in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition
of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois
epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations,
with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all
that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market
for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface
of the globe. It
must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions
everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation
of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production
and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has
drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on
which it stood. All old-established national industries have
been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged
by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death
question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer
work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the
remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only
at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old
wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant
lands and climes. In place of the old local and national
seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every
direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in
material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual
creations of individual nations become common property. National
one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more
impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures,
there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement
of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means
of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations
into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the
heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with
which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of
foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction,
to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it
compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into
their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world
after its own image. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country
to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly
increased the urban population as compared with the rural,
and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from
the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent
on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries
dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on
nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing
away with the scattered state of the population, of the
means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has
concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence
of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but
loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws,
governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into
one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national
class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The
bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has
created more massive and more colossal productive forces than
have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's
forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry
and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs,
clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of
rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground--what
earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive
forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? We see then: the means of production and of
exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up,
were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these
means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which
feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of
agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal
relations of property became no longer compatible with the
already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst
asunder. Into their place stepped free competition,
accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted
to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois
class. A similar movement is going on before our
own eyes. Modern
bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange
and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic
means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is
no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he
has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history
of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of
modern productive forces against modern conditions of production,
against the property relations that are the conditions for the
existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to
mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put
on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the
entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only
of the existing products, but also of the previously created
productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises
there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would
have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into
a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal
war of devastation had cut off the supply of every
means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed;
and why? Because
there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence,
too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at
the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development
of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they
have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are
fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring
disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois
society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these
crises? On the one
hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the
other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough
exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the
way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by
diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled
feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie
itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the
weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence
the men who are to wield those weapons--the modern working
class--the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital,
is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat,
the modern working class, developed--a class of labourers, who
live only so long as they find work, and who find work only
so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves
piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of
commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of
competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. Owing to the extensive use of machinery and
to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost
all individual character, and consequently, all charm for
the workman. He
becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most
simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is
required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman
is restricted, almost entirely, to the means
of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the
propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore
also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion
therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage
decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery
and division of labour increases, in the same
proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation
of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in
a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc. Modern industry has converted the little workshop
of the patriarchal master into the great factory
of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory,
are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they
are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers
and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois
class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily
and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above
all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this
despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty,
the more hateful and the more embittering it is. The less the skill and exertion of strength
implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry
becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded
by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer
any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of
labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age
and sex. No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer
by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages
in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie,
the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc. The lower strata of the middle class--the
small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally,
the handicraftsmen and peasants--all these sink gradually into the
proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not
suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and
is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly
because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by
the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all
classes of the population. The proletariat goes through various stages
of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the
bourgeoisie. At
first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by
the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade,
in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly
exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the
bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments
of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that
compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they
set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished
status of the workman of the Middle Ages. At this stage the labourers still form an
incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken
up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact
bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own
active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class,
in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the
whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able
to do so. At this
stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies,
but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute
monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty
bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated
in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a
victory for the bourgeoisie. But with the development of industry the proletariat
not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated
in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength
more. The various
interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the
proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as
machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing
competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial
crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The
unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing,
makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions
between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and
more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon
the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against
the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of
wages; they found permanent associations in order to make
provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and
there the contest breaks out into riots. Now and then the workers are victorious, but
only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not
in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of
the workers. This
union is helped on by the improved means of communication that
are created by modern industry and that place the workers of
different localities in contact with one another. It was just
this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local
struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle
between classes. But every class struggle is a political
struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers
of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways,
required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways,
achieve in a few years. This organisation of the proletarians into
a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually
being upset again by the competition between the workers
themselves. But it
ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels
legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers,
by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie
itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was carried. Altogether collisions between the classes
of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development
of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a
constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with
those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose
interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry;
at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees
itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its
help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The
bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its
own instruments of political and general education, in other
words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting
the bourgeoisie. Further, as we have already seen, entire sections
of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated
into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in
their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh
elements of enlightenment and progress. Finally, in times when the class struggle
nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on
within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society,
assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section
of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary
class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at
an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the
bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the
proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois
ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. Of all the classes that stand face to face
with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary
class. The other classes decay and finally disappear
in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special
and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer,
the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all
these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their
existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but
conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try
to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are
revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending
transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their
present, but their future interests, they desert their own
standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that
passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old
society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement
by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however,
prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue. In the conditions of the proletariat, those
of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without
property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer
anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern
industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in
England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him
of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion,
are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in
ambush just as many bourgeois interests. All the preceding classes that got the upper
hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting
society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians
cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except
by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and
thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They
have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission
is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of,
individual property. All previous historical movements were movements
of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is
the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority,
in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the
lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise
itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official
society being sprung into the air. Though not in substance, yet in form, the
struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first
a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course,
first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. In depicting the most general phases of the
development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled
civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where
that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent
overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway
of the proletariat. Hitherto, every form of society has been based,
as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing
and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions
must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its
slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised
himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty
bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to
develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary,
instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and
deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He
becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than
population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the
bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in
society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society
as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is
incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his
slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a
state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie,
in other words, its existence is no longer compatible
with society. The essential condition for the existence,
and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and
augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour
rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The
advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie,
replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition,
by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The
development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its
feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and
appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces,
above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of
the proletariat are equally inevitable. II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS In what relation do the Communists stand to
the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party
opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart
from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles
of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian
movement. The Communists are distinguished from the
other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles
of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out
and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat,
independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which
the struggle of the working class against the
bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent
the interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists, therefore, are on the one
hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of
the working-class parties of every country, that section which
pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically,
they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage
of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions,
and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The immediate aim of the Communist is the
same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of
the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy,
conquest of political power by the proletariat. The theoretical conclusions of the Communists
are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been
invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal
reformer. They
merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from
an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on
under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property
relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism. All property relations in the past have continually
been subject to historical change consequent upon the change
in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished
feudal property in favour of bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is
not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois
property. But
modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete
expression of the system of producing and appropriating products,
that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the
many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists
may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private
property. We Communists have been reproached with the
desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property
as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged
to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the
property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of
property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to
abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent
already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labour create any property for
the labourer? Not
a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property
which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase
except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour
for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on
the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides
of this antagonism. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a
purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product,
and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last
resort, only by the united action of all members of society,
can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it
is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into
common property, into the property of all members of society, personal
property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social
character of the property that is changed. It loses its
class-character. Let us now take wage-labour. The average price of wage-labour is the minimum
wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence,
which is absolutely requisite in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the
wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely
suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no
means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the
products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the
maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no
surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we
want to do away with, is the miserable character of this
appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase
capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of
the ruling class requires it. In bourgeois society, living labour is but
a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour
is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence
of the labourer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past
dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates
the past. In
bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality,
while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things
is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and
freedom! And rightly
so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality,
bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly
aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois
conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free
selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and
all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in
general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted
selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages,
but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of
buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production,
and of the bourgeoisie itself. You are horrified at our intending to do away
with private property. But in your existing society, private property
is already done away with for nine-tenths of
the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its
non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with
intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary
condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any
property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending
to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend. From the moment when labour can no longer
be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power
capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual
property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property,
into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes. You must, therefore, confess that by "individual"
you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the
middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of
the way, and made impossible. Communism deprives no man of the power to
appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to
deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by
means of such appropriation. It has been objected that upon the abolition
of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness
will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought
long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those
of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire
anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another
expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be
any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital. All objections urged against the Communistic
mode of producing and appropriating material products, have,
in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of
producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois,
the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of
production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to
him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments,
is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine. But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply,
to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard
of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but
the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and
bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of
your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential
character and direction are determined by the economical
conditions of existence of your class. The selfish misconception that induces you
to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the
social forms springing from your present mode of production
and form of property--historical relations that rise and
disappear in the progress of production--this misconception
you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the
case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal
property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of
your own bourgeois form of property. Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this
infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family,
the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed
form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this
state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of
the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter
of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish
with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the
exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed
of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by
the social conditions under which you educate,
by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of
schools, etc.? The
Communists have not invented the intervention of society in
education; they do but seek to alter the character of that
intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the
ruling class. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and
education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child,
becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of
Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn
asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles
of commerce and instruments of labour. But you Communists would introduce community
of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument
of production. He hears that the instruments of production
are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no
other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise
fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real
point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments
of production. For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than
the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the
community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially
established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce
community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial. Our bourgeois, not content with having the
wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not
to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in
seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system
of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists
might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to
introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed,
an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the
abolition of the present system of production must bring with it
the abolition of the community of women springing from that
system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private. The Communists are further reproached with
desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what
they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all
acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of
the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far,
itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. National differences and antagonisms between
peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development
of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the
world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in
the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause
them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries
at least, is one of the first conditions for
the emancipation of the proletariat. In proportion as the exploitation of one individual
by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one
nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between
classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation
to another will come to an end. The charges against Communism made from a
religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological
standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination. Does it require deep intuition to comprehend
that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's
consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his
material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove,
than that intellectual production changes its character
in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age
have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of ideas that revolutionise
society, they do but express the fact, that within the old
society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the
dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution
of the old conditions of existence. When the ancient world was in its last throes,
the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas
succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal
society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary
bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom
of conscience merely gave expression to the sway
of free competition within the domain of knowledge. "Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious,
moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in
the course of historical development. But religion, morality philosophy,
political science, and law, constantly survived this change." "There are, besides, eternal truths, such
as Freedom, Justice, etc. that are common to all states of society. But Communism
abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all
morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it
therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience." What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of
all past society has consisted in the development of class
antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at
different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one
fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part
of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness
of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety
it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general
ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total
disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical
rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder
that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional
ideas. But let us have done with the bourgeois objections
to Communism. We have seen above, that the first step in
the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat
to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy
to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie,
to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of
the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class;
and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be
effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of
property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by
means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient
and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement,
outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social
order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising
the mode of production. These measures will of course be different
in different countries. Nevertheless in the most advanced countries,
the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application
of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants
and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the
State, by means of a national bank with State capital and
an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication
and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of
production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of
waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance
with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of
industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing
industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between
town and country, by a more equable distribution of
the population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public
schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in
its present form. Combination of education with industrial production,
&c., &c. When, in the course of development, class
distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated
in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation,
the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so
called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing
another. If the proletariat during its contest with
the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of
circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of
a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such,
sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it
will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions
for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally,
and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with
its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association,
in which the free development of each is the condition
for the free development of all. III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE 1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM A. Feudal Socialism Owing to their historical position, it became
the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write
pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830,
and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again
succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political
contest was altogether out of the question. A literary battle
alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature
the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible. In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy
were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interests,
and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in
the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their
revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering
in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe. In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation,
half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace
of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism,
striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but
always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend
the march of modern history. The aristocracy, in order to rally the people
to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so
often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal
coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter. One section of the French Legitimists and
"Young England" exhibited this spectacle. In pointing out that their mode of exploitation
was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget
that they exploited under circumstances and conditions
that were quite different, and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under
their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget
that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their
own form of society. For the rest, so little do they conceal the
reactionary character of their criticism that their chief
accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under
the bourgeois regime a class is being developed, which is destined
to cut up root and branch the old order of society. What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is
not so much that it creates a proletariat, as that it creates
a revolutionary proletariat. In political practice, therefore, they join
in all coercive measures against the working class; and in
ordinary life, despite their high falutin phrases, they stoop
to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry,
and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool,
beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with
the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism
a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private
property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the
place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification
of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian
Socialism is but the holy, water with which the priest consecrates
the heart-burnings of the aristocrat. B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism The feudal aristocracy was not the only class
that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose
conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern
bourgeois society. The mediaeval burgesses and the small peasant
proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries
which are but little developed, industrially and commercially,
these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising
bourgeoisie. In countries where modern civilisation has
become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois
has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie
and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois
society. The
individual members of this class, however, are being constantly
hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition,
and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment
approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent
section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures,
agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen. In countries like France, where the peasants
constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural
that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie,
should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime,
the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the
standpoint of these intermediate classes should take up the cudgels
for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the
head of this school, not only in France but also in England. This school of Socialism dissected with great
acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern
production. It laid
bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved,
incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and
division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a
few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the
inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery
of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying
inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of
extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral
bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities. In its positive aims, however, this form of
Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production
and of exchange, and with them the old property relations,
and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production
and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations
that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those
means. In either
case, it is both reactionary and Utopian. Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture,
patriarchal relations in agriculture. Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts
had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this
form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues. C. German, or "True," Socialism The Socialist and Communist literature of
France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie
in power, and that was the expression of the struggle against
this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the
bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal
absolutism. German philosophers, would-be philosophers,
and beaux esprits, eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting,
that when these writings immigrated from France into
Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with
German social conditions, this French literature lost all its
immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary
aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth
century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing
more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the
utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie
signified in their eyes the law of pure Will, of Will as it was
bound to be, of true human Will generally. The world of the German literate 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 literate
reversed this process with the profane French literature. They
wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism
of the economic functions of money, they wrote "Alienation
of Humanity," and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois
State they wrote "dethronement of the Category of the General,"
and so forth. The introduction of these philosophical phrases
at the back of the French historical criticisms they dubbed
"Philosophy of Action," "True Socialism," "German Science
of Socialism," "Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and
so on. The French Socialist and Communist literature
was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German
to express the struggle of one class with the other,
he felt conscious of having overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing,
not true requirements, but the requirements of truth;
not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature,
of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists
only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy. This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy
task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade
in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost
its pedantic innocence. The fight of the German, and especially, of
the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy,
in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest. By this, the long wished-for opportunity was
offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement
with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional
anathemas against liberalism, against representative
government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of
the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality,
and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain,
and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick
of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was,
presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its
corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political
constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment
was the object of the pending struggle in Germany. To the absolute governments, with their following
of parsons, professors, country squires and officials,
it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie. It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills
of floggings and bullets with which these same governments,
just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings. While this "True" Socialism thus served the
governments as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie,
it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest,
the interest of the German Philistines. In Germany the petty-bourgeois class, a
relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly
cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis
of the existing state of things. To preserve this class is to preserve the
existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of
the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction;
on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on
the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to
kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic. The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered
with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly
sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists
wrapped their sorry "eternal truths," all skin and bone,
served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such
a public. And on
its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own
calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois
Philistine. It proclaimed the German nation to be the
model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical
man. To every
villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher,
Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real
character. It went to the extreme length of directly
opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism,
and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt
of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called
Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847)
circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating
literature. 2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing
social grievances, in order to secure the continued
existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists,
humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class,
organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of Socialism has,
moreover, been worked out into complete systems. We may cite Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misere
as an example of this form. The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages
of modern social conditions without the struggles and
dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society
minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish
for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie
naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the
best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable
conception into various more or less complete systems. In
requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby
to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but
requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within
the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its
hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie. A second and more practical, but less systematic,
form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary
movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing
that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material
conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be
of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence,
this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands
abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an
abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative
reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations;
reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations
between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen
the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois
government. Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression,
when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech. Free trade: for the benefit of the working
class. Protective
duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for
the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the
only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois
is a bourgeois--for the benefit of the working class. 3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM We do not here refer to that literature which,
in every great modern revolution, has always given voice
to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf
and others. The first direct attempts of the proletariat
to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement,
when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily
failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat,
as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for
its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and
could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary
literature that accompanied these first movements of the
proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It
inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its
crudest form. The Socialist and Communist systems properly
so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring
into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above,
of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section
1. Bourgeois
and Proletarians). The founders of these systems see, indeed,
the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements,
in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy,
offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical
initiative or any independent political movement. Since the development of class antagonism
keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic
situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material
conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a
new social science, after new social laws, that are to create
these conditions. Historical action is to yield to their personal
inventive action, historically created conditions of
emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous
class-organisation of the proletariat to the organisation of
society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in
their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of
their social plans. In the formation of their plans they are conscious
of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class,
as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most
suffering class does the proletariat exist for them. The undeveloped state of the class struggle,
as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this
kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to
improve the condition of every member of society, even that of
the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at
large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the
ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand
their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the
best possible state of society? Hence, they reject all political, and especially
all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain
their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments,
necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example,
to pave the way for the new social Gospel. Such fantastic pictures of future society,
painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped
state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position
correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class
for a general reconstruction of society. But these Socialist and Communist publications
contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials
for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures
proposed in them--such as the abolition of the distinction
between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of
industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage
system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the
functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production,
all these proposals, point solely to the disappearance of class
antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and
which, in these publications, are recognised in their earliest,
indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore,
are of a purely Utopian character. The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism
and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In
proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes
definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest,
these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all
theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators
of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their
disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their
masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development
of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently,
to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation
of their social Utopias, of founding isolated "phalansteres,"
of establishing "Home Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria"--duodecimo
editions of the New Jerusalem--and to realise all these castles
in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and
purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category
of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above,
differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and
by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous
effects of their social science. They, therefore, violently oppose all political
action on the part of the working class; such action, according
to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new
Gospel. The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists
in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the
Reformistes. IV. POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO
THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES Section II has made clear the relations of
the Communists to the existing working-class parties, such as the
Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America. The Communists fight for the attainment of
the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests
of the working class; but in the movement of the present,
they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France the
Communists ally themselves with the Social-Democrats, against the
conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the
right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and
illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution. In Switzerland they support the Radicals,
without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic
elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French
sense, partly of radical bourgeois. In Poland they support the party that insists
on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national
emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow
in 1846. In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie
whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy,
the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie. But they never cease, for a single instant,
to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition
of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat,
in order that the German workers may straightaway use, as so
many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political
conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along
with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary
classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie
itself may immediately begin. The Communists turn their attention chiefly
to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois
revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced
conditions of European civilisation, and with a much
more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the
seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because
the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude
to an immediately following proletarian revolution. In short, the Communists everywhere support
every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political
order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front,
as the leading question in each, the property question, no
matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union
and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to conceal their views
and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be
attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social
conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic
revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but
their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
So is Marx narrating this?