Manifesto of the Communist Party
Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels
1848
1
Bourgeois and Proletarians
2
Proletarians and Communists
3
Socialist and Communist Literature
4
Position of the Communists in relation to the various existing
opposition parties
A spectre is hauntingEurope-- the
spectre of communism. All the powers of oldEuropehave entered into
a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich
and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that
has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power?
Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding
reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition
parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this
fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged
by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists
should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views,
their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the
spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party
itself.
To this end, Communists of various
nationalities have assembled inLondonand sketched the following
manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian,
Flemish and Danish languages.
I -- BOURGEOIS AND
PROLETARIANS [1]
The history of all hitherto existing
society [2] is
the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and
plebian, lord and serf, guild-master [3] and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,
now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common
ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we
find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into
various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient
Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, 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 distinct feature: it has
simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and
proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages
sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these
burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were
developed.
The discovery ofAmerica, the rounding
of theCape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The
East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade
with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to
industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the
revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid
development.
The feudal system of industry, in
which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now
no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The
manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed
aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between
the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of
labor in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever
growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer
sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial
production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, MODERN
INDUSTRY; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial
millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the
modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the
world market, for which the discovery ofAmericapaved the way. This
market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation,
to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on
the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce,
navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the
background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern
bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development,
of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of
exchange.
Each step in the development of the
bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in
that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal
nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval
commune [4]:
here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there
taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward,
in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the
semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the
nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in
general -- the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of
Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in
the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The
executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has
played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got
the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic
relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties
that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other
nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash
payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of
religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has
resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the
numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has
substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal
exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its
halo every occupation hitherto honored 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
laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from
the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family
relation into a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it
came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages,
which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in
the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what
man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far
surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic
cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all
former exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and
thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production
in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant
revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all
social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed,
fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into
air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations
with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding
market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire
surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has, through its
exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to
production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin
of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the
national ground on which it stood. All old-established national
industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They
are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life
and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no
longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from
the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not
only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the
old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant
lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion
and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction,
universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also
in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of
individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness
and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the
numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world
literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid
improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely
facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most
barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of
commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the
barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.
It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the
bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it
calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois
themselves. In 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 civilized 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 population,
centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property
in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political
centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces,
with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of
taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one
government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one
frontier, and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of
scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more
colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations
together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery,
application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam
navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole
continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole
populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had
even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the
lap of social labor?
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 organization 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 in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois
class.
A similar movement is going on before
our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of
production, of exchange and of property, a society that has
conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is
like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of
the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a
decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the
history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern
conditions of production, against the property relations that are
the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.
It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their
periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois
society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these
crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of
the previously created productive forces, are periodically
destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in
all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic
of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a
state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a
universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means
of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And
why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of
subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive
forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the
development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the
contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by
which they are fettered, and 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, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces;
on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more
thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving
the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by
diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the
bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against
the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie
forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called
into existence the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern
working class -- the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie,
i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the
proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of
laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find
work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers,
who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every
other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the
vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the
market.
Owing to the extensive use of
machinery, and to the division of labor, 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 maintenance, and for the
propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and
therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In
proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases,
the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of
machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion
the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the
working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time,
or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the
little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of
the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the
factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial
army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of
officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois
class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly
enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, in 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 labor, in other words, the more modern
industry becomes developed, the more is the labor 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 labor, more or less expensive to use, according to
their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the
laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his
wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the
bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker,
etc.
The lower strata of the middle class
-- the small trades people, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen
generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink
gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive
capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is
carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large
capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered
worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is
recruited from all classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various
stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the
bourgeoisie. At first, the contest is carried on by individual
laborers, then by the work of people of a factory, then by the
operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual
bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not
against the bourgeois condition of production, but against the
instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares
that compete with their labor, 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 laborers 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 bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is
concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so
obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry,
the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes
concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels
that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life
within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in
proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and
nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing
competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial
crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The
increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing,
makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions
between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and
more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon,
the workers begin to form combinations (trade 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
lie 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 centralize the numerous
local struggles, all of the same character, into one national
struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political
struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the
Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the
modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few
years.
This organization of the proletarians
into a class, and, consequently, into a political party, is
continually being upset again by the competition between the
workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer,
mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular
interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions
among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the Ten-Hours Bill inEnglandwas
carried.
Altogether, collisions between the
classes of the old society further in many ways the course of
development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself
involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later
on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests
have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time
with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it
sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for
help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie
itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements
of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes
the proletariat with weapons for fighting the
bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen,
entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of
industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least
threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the
proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and
progress.
Finally, in times when the class
struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going
on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old
society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small
section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the
revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.
Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility
went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie
goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the
bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a
whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to
face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a
genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally
disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its
special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small
manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these
fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their
existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not
revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary,
for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they
are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending
transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present,
but their future interests; they 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 the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement
by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however,
prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue.
In the condition of the proletariat,
those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The
proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and
children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family
relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the
same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has
stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality,
religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which
lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got
the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by
subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation.
The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of
society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of
appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of
appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to
fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for,
and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements
were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The
proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of
the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The
proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot
stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent
strata of official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form,
the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a
national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course,
first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases
of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less
veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point
where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the
violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the
sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has
been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of
oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class,
certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at
least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of
serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the
petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed
to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary,
instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and
deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He
becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than
population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the
bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society,
and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an
overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to
assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it
cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed
him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under
this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer
compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the
existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation
and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage
labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the
laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is
the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to
competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association.
The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its
feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and
appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces,
above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of
the proletariat are equally inevitable.
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 the other working-class
parties.
They have no interests separate and
apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian
principles of their own, by which to shape and mold 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 lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate
general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists
is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of
the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy,
conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the
Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have
been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal
reformer.
They merely express, in general
terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle,
from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The
abolition of existing property relations is not at all a
distinctive feature of communism.
All property relations in the past
have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon
the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example,
abolished feudal property in favor 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 labor, which property is
alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and
independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned
property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the
small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form?
There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has
to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it
daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois
private property?
But does wage labor create any
property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that
kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot
increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage
labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is
based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. 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 only
personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted
into common property, into the property of all members of society,
personal property is not thereby transformed into social property.
It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It
loses its class character.
Let us now take wage
labor.
The average price of wage labor is
the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence
which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence
as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by
means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare
existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal
appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is
made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that
leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All
that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this
appropriation, under which the laborer 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 labor is
but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society,
accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote
the existence of the laborer.
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
bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in
contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered
traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the
communist abolition of buying and selling, or 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 labor can no
longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social
power capable of being monopolized, 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 labor of others by
means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the
abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal
laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society
ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for
those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this
objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can no
longer be any wage labor when there is no longer any
capital.
All objections urged against the
communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products,
have, in the same way, been urged against the communistic mode of
producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the
bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance
of production itself, so the 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 stringing 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 proletarians, and in public
prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a
matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish
with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop
the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we
plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most
hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by
social.
And your education! Is not that also
social, and determined by the social conditions under which you
educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by
means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the
intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the
character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the
influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois claptrap about the
family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and
child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of
Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are
torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles
of commerce and instruments of labor.
But you Communists would introduce
community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife a mere
instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of
production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come
to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will
likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the
real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere
instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more
ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the
community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and
officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no
need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time
immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with
having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal,
not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in
seducing each other's wives. (Ah, those were the days!)
Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a
system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the
Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to
introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an
openly legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is
self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production
must bring with it the abolition of free love 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 workers 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 antagonism
between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the
development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the
world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the
conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will
cause them to vanish still faster. United action of the leading
civilized countries at least is one of the first conditions for the
emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of
one individual by another will also be put an end to, the
exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to.
In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation
vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an
end.
The charges against communism made
from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an
ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious
examination.
Does it require deep intuition to
comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conception, in one word,
man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of
his material existence, in his social relations and in his social
life?
What else does the history of ideas
prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in
proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of
each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of the ideas that
revolutionize society, they do but express that fact that within
the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and
that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the
dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its
last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity.
When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth 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 juridicial 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 relations; no wonder that its
development involved the most radical rupture with traditional
ideas.
But let us have done with the
bourgeois objections to communism.
We have seen above that the first
step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the
proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of
democracy.
The proletariat will use its
political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the
bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the
hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the
ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as
rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this
cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the
rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production;
by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically
insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the
movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the
old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely
revolutionizing the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be
different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced
countries, the following will be pretty generally
applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and
application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated
income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of
inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of
all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the
banks of the state, by means
of a national bank with state capital
and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of
communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and
instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into
cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil
generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work.
Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with
manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction
between town and country by a more equable distribution of the
populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children
in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its
present form. Combination of education with industrial production,
etc.
When, in the course of development,
class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been
concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole
nation, the public power will lose its political character.
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power
of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its
contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of
circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a
revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps
away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along
with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the
existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will
thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois
society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an
association in which the free development of each is the condition
for the free development of all.
III -- SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST
LITERATURE
1. REACTIONARY
SOCIALISM
a. Feudal Socialism
Owing to their historical position,
it became the vocation of the aristocracies of Franceand Englandto
write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French
Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these
aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth,
a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A
literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of
literature, the old cries of the restoration period had become
impossible. [1]
In order to arouse sympathy, the
aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own
interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie
in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the
aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new
masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming
catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal socialism:
half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half
menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive
criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but
always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to
comprehend the march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally
the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a
banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their
hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud
and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists
and "Young England" exhibited this spectacle:
In pointing out that their mode of
exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the
feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and
conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated.
In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never
existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary
offspring of their own form of society.
For the rest, so little do they
conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their
chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this: that under
the bourgeois 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 corrective 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 honor, for traffic in wool,
beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. [2]
As the parson has ever gone hand in
hand with the landlord, so has clerical socialism with feudal
socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give
Christian asceticism a socialist tinge. Has not Christianity
declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the
state? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and
poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and
Mother Church? Christian socialism is but the holy water with which
the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the
aristocrat.
b. Petty-Bourgeois
Socialism
The feudal aristocracy was not the
only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class
whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere
of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small
peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie.
In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and
commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with
the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern
civilization has become fully developed, a new class of petty
bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and
bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself a supplementary part of
bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however,
as 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
inFrancebut also inEngland.
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 labor; 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 it 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 hangover.
c. German or "True"
Socialism
The socialist and communist
literature ofFrance, a literature that originated under the
pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of
the struggle against this power, was introduced intoGermanyat a
time when the bourgeoisie in that country had just begun its
contest with feudal absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be
philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seized on
this literature, only forgetting that when these writings
immigrated fromFranceintoGermany, French social conditions had not
immigrated along with them. In contact with German social
conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical
significance and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the
German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the
first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of
"Practical Reason" in general, and the utterance of the will of the
revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws
of pure will, of will as it was bound to be, of true human will
generally.
The work of the German literati
consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with
their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the
French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of
view.
This annexation took place in the
same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by
translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote
silly lives of Catholic saints _over_ the manuscripts on which the
classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German
literati reversed this process with the profane French literature.
They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French
original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the
economic functions of money, they wrote "alienation of humanity",
and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote
"dethronement of the category of the general", and so
forth.
The introduction of these
philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical
criticisms, they dubbed "Philosophy of Action", "True Socialism",
"German Science of Socialism", "Philosophical Foundation of
Socialism", and so on.
The French socialist and communist
literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased,
in the hands of the German, to express the struggle of one class
with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome "French
one-sidedness" and of representing, not true requirements, but the
requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but
the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no
class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of
philosophical fantasy.
This German socialism, which took its
schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor
stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually
lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the Germans, and
especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy
and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became
more earnest.
By this, the long-wished for
opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the
political movement with the socialistic 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
inGermany.
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 flogging and bullets, with which these same
governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class
risings.
While this "True" Socialism thus
served the government as a weapon for fighting the German
bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a
reactionary interest, the interest of German philistines.
InGermany, the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth
century, and since then constantly cropping up again under the
various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of
things.
To preserve this class is to preserve
the existing state of things inGermany. 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 recognized, more and more, its own
calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois
philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be
the model nation, and the German petty philistine to be the typical
man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a
hidden, higher, socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of
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
Germanybelong to the domain of this foul and enervating
literature. [3]
2. CONSERVATIVE OR BOURGEOIS
SOCIALISM
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous
of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued
existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists,
philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the
working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the
prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics,
hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of
socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete
systems.
We may cite
Proudhon's Philosophy of
Poverty as an example of this form.
The socialistic bourgeois want all
the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles
and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the
existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and
disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a
proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which
it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois socialism develops this
comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems.
In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and
thereby to march straightaway into the social New Jerusalem, it but
requires in reality that the proletariat should remain within the
bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful
ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second, and more practical, but
less systematic, form of this socialism sought to depreciate every
revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing
that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material
conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any
advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of
existence, this form of socialism, however, by no means understands
abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition
that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative
reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations;
reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between
capital and labor, 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 [4] and
others.
The first direct attempts of the
proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal
excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily
failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as
well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its
emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be
produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary
literature that accompanied these first movements of the
proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated
universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest
form.
The socialist and communist systems,
properly so called, those of Saint-Simon [5],
Fourier [6],
Owen [7],
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
organization of the proletariat to an organization of society
especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves
itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical
carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they
are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working
class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of
view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist
for them.
The undeveloped state of the class
struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of
this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class
antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of
society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually
appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay,
by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people when once
they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible
plan of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and
especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends
by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force
of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future
society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very
undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own
position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that
class for a general reconstruction of society.
But these socialist and communist
publications contain also a critical element. They attack every
principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most
valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The
practical measures proposed in them -- such as the abolition of the
distinction between town and country, of the family, of the
carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals,
and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the
conversion of the function of the state into a more superintendence
of production -- all these proposals point solely to the
disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only
just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognized
in their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These
proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian character.
The significance of critical-utopian
socialism and communism bears an inverse relation to historical
development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops
and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the
contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value
and all theoretical justifications. 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, endeavor, and that consistently, to
deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms.
They still dream of experimental realization of their social
utopias, of founding isolated phalansteres,
of establishing "Home Colonies", or setting up a "Little
Icaria" [8] --
pocket editions of the New Jerusalem -- and to realize all these
castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings
and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the
category of the reactionary conservative socialists depicted above,
differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their
fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of
their social science.
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 inEngland, and the
Fourierists inFrance, 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 inEnglandand the Agrarian Reformers
inAmerica.
The Communists fight for the
attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the
momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of
the present, they also represent and take care of the future of
that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social
Democrats* against
the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the
right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and
illusions traditionally handed down from the Great
Revolution.
InSwitzerland, 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.
InPoland, they support the party that
insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for
national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection
ofKrakowin 1846.
InGermany, they fight with the
bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the
absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the
petty-bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single
instant, to instill into the working class the clearest possible
recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and
proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use,
as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and
political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily
introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the
fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the
bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention
chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a
bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more
advanced conditions of European civilization and with a much more
developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth,
and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois
revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately
following proletarian revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere
support every revolutionary movement against the existing social
and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to
the front, as the leading question in each, the property question,
no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for
the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all
countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal
their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be
attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social
conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist
revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.
Proletarians of all countries,
unite!
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