Manifesto of the Communist Party

Preface to the German Edition of 1872

The Communist League, an international association of workers which, under the conditions of the time, could of course only be a secret one, commissioned the undersigned, at its congress held in London in November 1847, to draw up a detailed theoretical and practical program for the party, intended for the public. The result was the following "Manifesto," whose manuscript traveled to London to be printed a few weeks before the February Revolution. First published in German, it has been reprinted in that language in at least twelve different editions in Germany, England and America. In English it first appeared in London in 1850 in the Red Republican, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and in 1871 in at least three different translations in America. In French, it first appeared in Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848, and recently in Le Socialiste of New York. A new translation is in preparation. In Polish, in London, shortly after its first German edition. In Russian, in Geneva, in the 1860s. It was also translated into Danish soon after it appeared.¹

However much conditions may have changed in the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this "Manifesto" are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of these principles, as the "Manifesto" itself states, will depend everywhere and at all times on the historical conditions of the day, and for that reason no special weight is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would today read very differently in many respects. In view of the immense development of large-scale industry in the last twenty-five years and the accompanying progress in the party organization of the working class, and in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution and still more in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat held political power for the first time, for two months, this program has today become out of date in places. One thing especially was proved by the Commune: that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the state and set it in motion for its own purposes." (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association, German edition, p. 19, where this point is developed further.) It is self-evident, moreover, that the criticism of socialist literature is incomplete for the present day, since it comes down only to 1847; and likewise that the remarks on the position of the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties (Section IV), though still correct in their main lines, are already out of date in their details, if only because the political situation has been completely transformed and the course of history has swept most of the parties listed there off the face of the earth.²

Nevertheless, the "Manifesto" is a historical document which we no longer feel we have the right to alter. A later edition may perhaps appear with an introduction bridging the gap from 1847 to the present; this reprint came upon us too unexpectedly to leave us time for that.

London, June 24, 1872.

Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels.

Preface to the Russian Edition of 1882

The first Russian edition of the "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in Bakunin's translation, appeared early in the 1860s from the printing press of the Kolokol. At that time the West could see in a Russian edition of this work at most a literary curiosity. Today such a view is no longer possible. How narrow a field the proletarian movement covered when the "Manifesto" first appeared (January 1848) is best shown by its last chapter, "The Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties." Russia and the United States, above all, are missing from it. It was the time when Russia formed the last great reserve of European reaction, and when emigration to the United States absorbed the surplus forces of the European proletariat. Both countries supplied Europe with raw materials and served at the same time as markets for the sale of its industrial products. Both, then, appeared in one way or another as pillars of the European social order.³

How all this has changed today! It is precisely European emigration that has made possible the colossal development of North American agriculture, whose competition is shaking landed property in Europe, great and small alike, to its foundations. At the same time it has enabled the United States to set about exploiting its abundant industrial resources with such energy and on such a scale that it must, within a short time, put an end to the industrial monopoly of Western Europe. And both these circumstances react on America itself in a revolutionary direction. The small and middle-sized landholding of the farmers who work their own land, the foundation of the whole political order of America, is succumbing more and more to the competition of giant farms, while at the same time a numerous proletariat is forming in the industrial districts for the first time, alongside a fabulous concentration of capital.

Let us turn to Russia. At the time of the revolution of 1848–49, not only the monarchs of Europe but the European bourgeois as well saw in Russian intervention their only rescue from the proletariat, which was only just then becoming aware of its strength. They proclaimed the Tsar the head of European reaction. Today he sits in Gatchina as the prisoner of war of the revolution, and Russia forms the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in Europe.⁴

The task of the "Communist Manifesto" was to proclaim the inevitable, approaching downfall of present-day bourgeois property. In Russia, however, alongside a capitalist order developing at feverish speed and a bourgeois landed property only just taking shape, we find more than half the land owned in common by the peasants.

The question now is this: can the Russian peasant commune, this form of primeval common ownership of the land, though already much broken down, pass directly into a higher, communist form of landed property? Or must it first go through the same process of dissolution that is shown in the historical development of the West?⁵

The only answer to this question possible today is the following. If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a workers' revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then the present Russian common ownership of land can serve as the starting point for a communist development.

London, January 21, 1882.

Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels.

Preface to the German Edition of 1883

The preface to this edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole working class of Europe and America owes more than to anyone else, Marx rests in Highgate Cemetery, and the first grass is already growing over his grave. Since his death there can be even less question of revising or adding to the "Manifesto." All the more necessary, I think, to state the following here once again, explicitly.⁶

The basic thought running through the "Manifesto" is this: that the economic production of every historical epoch, and the structure of society that necessarily follows from it, form the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that accordingly (ever since the breakup of the primeval common ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, ruled and ruling classes at different stages of social development; but that this struggle has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer free itself from the class that exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie) without at the same time freeing the whole of society, once and for all, from exploitation, oppression and class struggles. This basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.⁷

I have often said this before; but just now it is necessary that it should also stand at the front of the "Manifesto" itself.

London, June 28, 1883.

F. Engels.

Manifesto of the Communist Party

A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have banded together in a holy hunt to run this specter down: the Pope and the Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police.⁸

Where is the opposition party that its opponents in power have not decried as communist? Where is the opposition party that has not flung the branding charge of communism straight back, at opposition people more advanced than itself and at its reactionary enemies alike?

Two things follow from this fact.

Communism is already acknowledged by all the powers of Europe to be a power itself.

It is high time for the Communists to set out openly, before the whole world, how they see things, what they aim at and where they tend, and to meet this fairy tale about the specter of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end Communists of the most varied nationalities have gathered in London and drawn up the following manifesto, to be published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish.

I. Bourgeois and Proletarians

The history of all society up to now is the history of class struggles.^9,10

Free man and slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guild-master and journeyman: in a word, oppressor and oppressed have always stood against each other, locked in an unbroken fight, now hidden, now open, a fight that each time ended either in the revolutionary remaking of the whole of society or in the common downfall of the classes at war.¹¹

In the earlier ages of history we find, almost everywhere, society fully sorted into separate estates, a many-runged ladder of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, serfs, and within nearly every one of these classes, finer grades again.

Modern bourgeois society, sprung from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has only put new classes, new conditions of oppression and new forms of struggle in the place of the old.

Our age, the age of the bourgeoisie, has one distinguishing mark, however: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting more and more into two great hostile camps, two great classes squarely facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat.¹²

Out of the serfs of the Middle Ages came the burghers of the first towns, and out of these burghers grew the first elements of the bourgeoisie.

The discovery of America and the passage round Africa opened fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The markets of the East Indies and China, the colonizing of America, trade with the colonies, the multiplying of the means of exchange and of commodities in general gave commerce, shipping and industry a surge never seen before, and with it sent the revolutionary element inside a crumbling feudal society racing ahead.

The old feudal or guild way of running industry could no longer keep up with the demand that swelled with the new markets. Manufacture took its place. The guild masters were shouldered aside by the industrial middle class, and the division of labor between the different guilds vanished in the face of the division of labor inside each single workshop.¹³

But the markets went on growing and demand went on rising. Soon manufacture, too, fell short. Then steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. Modern large-scale industry took the place of manufacture; the industrial millionaires took the place of the industrial middle class: the commanders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Large-scale industry has created the world market, which the discovery of America had prepared. The world market has given commerce, shipping and overland communication a development beyond measure. That development has in turn driven the further spread of industry, and in the same measure as industry, commerce, shipping and railways spread, in the same measure the bourgeoisie grew, piled up its capital and pushed every class handed down from the Middle Ages into the background.

We see, then, that the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a whole series of upheavals in the modes of production and of exchange.

Every one of these steps in the rise of the bourgeoisie brought a matching step forward in politics. An oppressed estate under the rule of the feudal lords; armed, self-governing associations in the commune; here an independent city republic, there the tax-paying third estate of a monarchy; then, in the age of manufacture, a counterweight to the nobility in the monarchy of estates or the absolute monarchy, and the main foundation of the great monarchies in general: the bourgeoisie has at last, since the arrival of large-scale industry and the world market, fought its way to sole political rule in the modern representative state. The power of the modern state is nothing but a committee that manages the common business of the whole bourgeois class.¹⁴

The bourgeoisie has played a supremely revolutionary part in history.

Wherever it has come to power, the bourgeoisie has destroyed every feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relation. It has ruthlessly torn apart the motley feudal ties that bound a man to his natural superiors, and left no other bond between one human being and another than naked self-interest, than unfeeling "cash payment." It has drowned the holy shivers of pious ecstasy, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentality in the ice-cold water of selfish calculation. It has dissolved personal dignity into exchange value, and in place of the countless freedoms granted by charter and fairly won it has set the one unscrupulous freedom of trade. In a word, for exploitation veiled in religious and political illusions it has substituted exploitation that is open, shameless, direct and bare.¹⁵

The bourgeoisie has taken the halo off every occupation once held in honor and looked on with reverent awe. It has turned the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn the touchingly sentimental veil off the family and reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has revealed how the brute displays of force that the reactionaries so admire in the Middle Ages had their fitting complement in the most sluggish idleness. It was the first to show what human activity can bring about. It has worked wonders of quite another order than Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has carried out expeditions of quite another order than the great migrations of peoples and the Crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them the relations of production, and with them all the relations of society. For all earlier industrial classes, the first condition of existence was the opposite: keeping the old mode of production unchanged. Production overturned again and again, every social condition shaken without a pause, insecurity and motion without end: these set the bourgeois age apart from every one before it. All fixed, rusted-in relations, with their train of time-honored notions and views, are swept away; all newly formed ones are out of date before they have time to set hard. All that is fixed in rank and station evaporates, all that is holy is profaned, and at last people are forced to face their real conditions of life and their relations with one another with sober eyes.¹⁶

The need for an ever wider market for its products drives the bourgeoisie all over the earth. It has to dig in everywhere, build everywhere, forge links everywhere.

By exploiting the world market, the bourgeoisie has made production and consumption in every country cosmopolitan. Much to the reactionaries' regret, it has pulled the national ground out from under industry's feet. Ancient national industries have been wiped out and are still being wiped out every day. They are driven out by new industries, whose introduction becomes a matter of life and death for every civilized nation: industries that no longer work up raw materials from home but raw materials brought from the remotest regions, and whose products are consumed not only at home but in every quarter of the globe at once. In place of the old wants, met by the country's own products, come new wants that call for the products of distant lands and climates. In place of the old local and national self-sufficiency and seclusion come traffic in every direction and the dependence of every nation on every other. And as in material production, so in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of single nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness grow more and more impossible, and out of the many national and local literatures a world literature arises.

Through the rapid improvement of every instrument of production, through communications made infinitely easier, the bourgeoisie drags every nation, even the most barbarian, into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it shoots every Chinese wall to rubble and forces even the barbarians' most stubborn hatred of foreigners to surrender. It compels every nation to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, unless it wants to go under; it compels them to bring in what it calls civilization, that is, to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it makes itself a world in its own likeness.

The bourgeoisie has put the countryside under the rule of the town. It has created enormous cities, it has vastly swelled the urban population against the rural, and so has rescued a large part of the population from the isolated narrowness of country life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the town, so it has made barbarian and half-barbarian countries dependent on civilized ones, peasant nations on bourgeois nations, the East on the West.

More and more, the bourgeoisie is putting an end to the scattering of the means of production, of property and of population. It has crowded the population together, centralized the means of production and concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary result was political centralization. Independent provinces, or provinces barely held together in loose alliance, with separate interests, laws, governments and tariffs, were pressed together into one nation, with one government, one code of law, one national class interest, one customs frontier.

In barely a hundred years of class rule the bourgeoisie has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than all the generations before it put together. Nature's forces harnessed, machinery, chemistry applied to industry and farming, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, whole continents cleared for the plow, rivers made navigable, whole populations summoned out of the ground as if by a stamp of the foot: what earlier century so much as suspected that such productive forces slept in the womb of social labor?

But we have seen that the means of production and exchange on which the bourgeoisie built itself up were produced in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and exchange, the relations under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacture, in a word the feudal property relations, no longer fitted the productive forces that had already grown up. They held production back instead of driving it forward. They turned into so many fetters. They had to be blown apart, and they were blown apart.

In their place came free competition, with a social and political constitution to suit it, and the economic and political rule of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our eyes. Bourgeois relations of production and exchange, bourgeois property relations, modern bourgeois society, which has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld he has summoned. For decades now the history of industry and commerce has been nothing but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern relations of production, against the property relations on which the bourgeoisie and its rule depend for their very life. It is enough to mention the commercial crises, which come round again and again, each time more threatening, and each time put the existence of the whole of bourgeois society in question. In these crises a great part not only of the goods already made, but of the productive forces already created, is regularly destroyed. In the crises an epidemic breaks out that every earlier age would have thought absurd: the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself thrown back into a state of momentary barbarism; it looks as though a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off every means of keeping alive; industry and commerce seem wrecked. And why? Because society has too much civilization, too many means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at its disposal no longer serve to advance bourgeois civilization and bourgeois property relations. On the contrary, they have grown too mighty for those relations and are held back by them, and as soon as they break through the obstruction they throw the whole of bourgeois society into disorder and threaten the existence of bourgeois property. Bourgeois relations have become too cramped to hold the wealth they have created. How does the bourgeoisie get through these crises? On the one hand by the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, how? By paving the way for crises more widespread and more violent, and by shrinking the means of preventing them.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie struck feudalism down are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But the bourgeoisie has not only forged the weapons that will be its death. It has also fathered the men who will carry them: the modern workers, the proletarians.

In the same measure as the bourgeoisie, that is, capital, develops, in the same measure the proletariat develops, the class of modern workers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor makes capital grow. These workers, who must sell themselves piece by piece, are a commodity like any other article of trade, and so are exposed alike to every turn of competition and every swing of the market.

With the spread of machinery and the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all independent character, and with it every attraction for the worker. He becomes a mere accessory of the machine, and all that is asked of him is the simplest, dullest, most easily learned motion of the hand. What a worker costs is therefore limited almost entirely to the means of subsistence he needs to keep himself alive and to bring up the next generation of his kind. But the price of a commodity, and so of labor too, is equal to its cost of production. In the same measure as the work grows more repellent, then, wages fall. Worse still, in the same measure as machinery and the division of labor increase, in the same measure the burden of work increases too, whether by longer hours, by more work exacted in a given time, by machines run faster, and so on.¹⁷

Modern industry has turned the little workroom of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of workers, packed into the factory, are drilled like soldiers. As rank-and-file soldiers of industry they are placed under the eye of a complete hierarchy of noncommissioned officers and officers. They are not only the servants of the bourgeois class and the bourgeois state; day by day and hour by hour they are made servants of the machine, of the overseer, and above all of the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. And the more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its whole aim, the pettier, the more hateful, the more galling it is.

The less skill and strength manual labor calls for, that is, the further modern industry develops, the more the labor of men is pushed out by the labor of women and children. Differences of sex and age have no social standing any longer for the working class. There are only instruments of labor, costing more or less according to age and sex.

Once the manufacturer has done exploiting the worker, for the moment, and handed him his wages in cash, the rest of the bourgeoisie descend on him: the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, and so on.

The lower middle classes of the past, the small manufacturers, merchants and people living on small private incomes, the craftsmen and peasants: all these classes sink into the proletariat, partly because their little capital is too small for large-scale industry and goes under in competition with the bigger capitalists, partly because new methods of production make their skill worthless. And so the proletariat is recruited from every class of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. Its struggle against the bourgeoisie begins the moment it exists.

At first single workers fight, then the workers of one factory, then the workers of one trade in one place, against the single bourgeois who exploits them directly. They aim their blows not only at the bourgeois relations of production but at the instruments of production themselves: they destroy competing foreign goods, smash machines, set factories on fire, and try to win back the vanished standing of the medieval worker.

At this stage the workers form a mass scattered over the whole country and broken up by competition. When they do hold together in large numbers, it is not yet the result of their own union but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which, to reach its own political ends, has to set the whole proletariat in motion, and for the time being still can. At this stage, then, the proletarians are fighting not their enemies but the enemies of their enemies: the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. The whole movement of history is thus concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and every victory won in this way is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry the proletariat does not merely grow in numbers. It is crowded together in larger masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The interests and conditions of life within the proletariat are more and more evened out, as machinery wipes away the distinctions between kinds of labor and drives wages almost everywhere down to the same low level. The growing competition of the bourgeois among themselves, and the commercial crises it breeds, make the workers' wages ever more unsteady; the unceasing improvement of machinery, coming faster and faster, makes their whole livelihood ever more precarious; more and more, the collisions between the single worker and the single bourgeois take on the character of collisions between two classes. The workers begin to form combinations, unions, against the bourgeois; they band together to keep their wages up. They even found permanent associations to lay in provisions for these occasional revolts. Here and there the struggle breaks out in riots.

Now and then the workers win, but only for a time. What their battles really yield is not the immediate success but the ever-widening union of the workers. It is helped along by the improved means of communication that large-scale industry creates, which bring the workers of different places into contact with one another. And contact is all it takes to centralize the many local struggles, everywhere of the same character, into one national struggle, a class struggle. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And the union that the townspeople of the Middle Ages, with their country lanes, took centuries to achieve, the modern proletarians, with their railways, achieve in a few years.

This organization of the proletarians into a class, and so into a political party, is shattered again and again by the competition among the workers themselves. But it always rises again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It forces the law to recognize particular interests of the workers by exploiting the splits within the bourgeoisie. Witness the Ten Hours Bill in England.¹⁸

The collisions within the old society generally help the proletariat along its course in many ways. The bourgeoisie is caught up in a constant battle: at first with the aristocracy; later with those sections of the bourgeoisie itself whose interests clash with the progress of industry; and always with the bourgeoisie of every foreign country. In all these battles it finds itself forced to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and so to drag it into the political movement. The bourgeoisie itself, then, hands the proletariat the elements of its own education, which is to say, weapons against itself.

Further, as we have seen, the progress of industry hurls whole sections of the ruling class down into the proletariat, or at least threatens their conditions of life. They too bring the proletariat a mass of elements of education.

Finally, in times when the class struggle is nearing the decisive hour, the process of dissolution within the ruling class, within the whole of the old society, takes on so violent, so glaring a character that a small part of the ruling class cuts itself loose and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as a part of the nobility once went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a part of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular a part of the bourgeois ideologists, those who have worked their way up to a theoretical understanding of the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a truly revolutionary class. The other classes decay and perish with the coming of large-scale industry; the proletariat is its very own product.

The middle classes, the small manufacturer, the small merchant, the craftsman, the peasant, all fight the bourgeoisie to save their existence as middle classes from ruin. They are not revolutionary, then, but conservative. Worse, they are reactionary, for they are trying to turn back the wheel of history. If they are revolutionary at all, they are so only in view of their coming fall into the proletariat; they are then defending not their present but their future interests, and deserting their own standpoint for that of the proletariat.

The lumpenproletariat, that passive putrefaction of the lowest layers of the old society, may here and there be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; but its whole way of life makes it far readier to sell itself to reactionary intrigue.¹⁹

The conditions of life of the old society are already wiped out in the conditions of life of the proletariat. The proletarian has no property. His relation to his wife and children has nothing left in common with the bourgeois family relation. Modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has peeled every national trait off him. Law, morality and religion are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, with just as many bourgeois interests hiding behind them.

All the earlier classes that won the upper hand tried to secure the position they had already gained by subjecting the whole of society to the conditions on which their own gains depended. The proletarians can take possession of the productive forces of society only by abolishing their own former mode of appropriation, and with it every former mode of appropriation. The proletarians have nothing of their own to secure. Their task is to destroy every private security and every private safeguard that has existed until now.

All previous movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest layer of present-day society, cannot rise, cannot stand up straight, without blowing sky-high the whole superstructure of layers that make up official society.

In its form, if not its content, the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all finish with its own bourgeoisie.

In sketching the most general phases of the proletariat's development, we have followed the more or less hidden civil war within existing society up to the point where it breaks out into open revolution, and where the proletariat lays the foundation of its rule by the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

All society up to now, as we have seen, has rested on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But to oppress a class, you must guarantee it conditions in which it can at least drag out its existence as a slave. The serf, under serfdom, worked his way up to membership of the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, worked his way up to bourgeois. The modern worker, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of his own class. The worker becomes a pauper, and pauperism grows faster still than population and wealth. Here it becomes plain that the bourgeoisie is unfit to remain the ruling class of society any longer, and unfit to impose the conditions of its own class's existence on society as the law that governs it. It is unfit to rule because it is unable to guarantee its slave a living even within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into a state where it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under it; that is, its life is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence and the rule of the bourgeois class is the piling up of wealth in private hands, the formation and growth of capital. The condition of capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests entirely on competition among the workers. The progress of industry, which the bourgeoisie carries along without will and without resistance, replaces the isolation of the workers by competition with their revolutionary union by association. The development of large-scale industry, then, cuts from under the feet of the bourgeoisie the very ground on which it produces and appropriates the products. Above all, it produces its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

II. Proletarians and Communists

How do the Communists stand in relation to the proletarians in general?

The Communists are not a separate party set up against the other workers' parties.

They have no interests apart from the interests of the whole proletariat.

They lay down no special principles of their own by which to mold the proletarian movement.

The Communists differ from the other proletarian parties in two respects only. In the national struggles of the proletarians in different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, whatever its nationality. And in the various stages of development through which the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie passes, they always stand for the interest of the movement as a whole.

In practice, then, the Communists are the most resolute part of the workers' parties of every country, the part that always pushes on further; in theory, they have this advantage over the rest of the proletarian mass, that they understand the conditions, the course and the general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: the formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of the rule of the bourgeoisie, the conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical propositions of the Communists in no way rest on ideas or principles invented or discovered by this or that world reformer.

They are simply general expressions of the actual relations of a class struggle that exists, of a historical movement going on before our eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is nothing peculiar to communism.

All property relations have been subject to continual historical change, to continual historical transformation.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.

What distinguishes communism is not the abolition of property in general but the abolition of bourgeois property.

But modern bourgeois private property is the latest and most perfected expression of a way of producing and appropriating products that rests on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of some by others.

In this sense the Communists can sum up their theory in a single phrase: the abolition of private property.²⁰

We Communists have been accused of wanting to abolish property that a person has acquired for himself, by his own labor: the property that is said to be the foundation of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Property you worked for, acquired, earned yourself! Do you mean the property of the petty bourgeois and the small peasant, the form of property that came before bourgeois property? There's no need for us to abolish that. The development of industry has abolished it already, and is abolishing it every day.

Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage labor, the labor of the proletarian, create any property for him? Not in the least. It creates capital, that is, the property that exploits wage labor, and that can grow only on condition that it breeds new wage labor to exploit all over again. Property in its present form moves within the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us look at both sides of that antagonism. To be a capitalist is to hold not just a purely personal position in production but a social one.

Capital is a collective product. It can be set in motion only by the joint activity of many members of society, indeed, in the last resort, only by the joint activity of all the members of society.

Capital, then, is not a personal power; it is a social power.

When capital is turned into common property, belonging to all the members of society, personal property is not thereby turned into social property. Only the social character of property changes. It loses its class character.

Now for wage labor.

The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, that is, the sum of the means of subsistence needed to keep the worker alive as a worker. What the wage laborer appropriates by his activity is therefore just enough to reproduce his bare life. We have no intention whatever of abolishing this personal appropriation of the products of labor for the reproduction of life itself, an appropriation that leaves no surplus that could give anyone power over other people's labor. All we want to abolish is the wretched character of this appropriation, under which the worker lives only to increase capital, and lives only so far as the interest of the ruling class requires.

In bourgeois society, living labor is only a means of increasing accumulated labor. In communist society, accumulated labor is only a means of widening, enriching and furthering the life of the workers.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past rules the present; in communist society the present rules the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has a personality, while the living, working individual is dependent and has none.

And the abolition of this state of affairs the bourgeoisie calls the abolition of personality and freedom! Quite right, too. What is at stake is indeed the abolition of bourgeois personality, bourgeois independence and bourgeois freedom.

Under the present bourgeois relations of production, freedom means free trade, free buying and selling.

But when the haggling goes, the free haggling goes with it. All the talk of free haggling, like all the other bravado about freedom from our bourgeois, means something only when set against haggling in chains, against the shackled townsman of the Middle Ages. It means nothing when set against the communist abolition of haggling, of the bourgeois relations of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You're horrified that we mean to abolish private property. But in your existing society private property has already been abolished for nine-tenths of its members; it exists precisely because it does not exist for those nine-tenths. What you reproach us with, then, is meaning to abolish a form of property whose necessary condition is that the immense majority of society owns nothing at all.

In a word, you reproach us with meaning to abolish your property. We do indeed. That's exactly what we want.

From the moment labor can no longer be turned into capital, money, ground rent, in short into a social power that can be monopolized, that is, from the moment personal property can no longer change over into bourgeois property, from that moment, you declare, the person has been abolished.

You admit, then, that by "the person" you mean nobody but the bourgeois, the owner of bourgeois property. And that person must indeed be abolished.

Communism takes from no one the power to appropriate the products of society; it takes away only the power to subjugate other people's labor by means of that appropriation.

It has been objected that once private property is abolished all activity will cease, and universal laziness will set in.

If that were so, bourgeois society would have collapsed from laziness long ago, since those of its members who work acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything don't work. The whole objection comes down to the tautology that there can be no more wage labor once there is no more capital.

All the objections raised against the communist mode of producing and appropriating material products have been stretched to cover the producing and appropriating of intellectual products too. Just as, for the bourgeois, the end of class property means the end of production itself, so for him the end of class culture is the same thing as the end of all culture.

The culture whose loss he mourns is, for the enormous majority, a drilling to be a machine.

But don't argue with us by measuring the abolition of bourgeois property against your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law and the rest. Your ideas themselves are products of bourgeois relations of production and property, just as your law is only the will of your class raised to statute, a will whose content is set by the material conditions of life of your class.

The self-interested notion that leads you to turn your relations of production and property, which are historical and pass away in the course of production, into eternal laws of nature and reason is one you share with every ruling class that has gone under before you. What you understand in the case of ancient property, what you understand in the case of feudal property, you're no longer allowed to understand in the case of bourgeois property.

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical get worked up over this shameful design of the Communists.

On what is the present family, the bourgeois family, founded? On capital, on private gain. In its fully developed form it exists only for the bourgeoisie; but it has its complement in the enforced absence of family life among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family naturally falls away when this complement of it falls away, and both disappear with the disappearance of capital.

Do you reproach us with wanting to end the exploitation of children by their parents? We confess to that crime. But, you say, we are destroying the most cherished of relations when we put social education in the place of education at home.

And isn't your education, too, determined by society? By the social conditions in which you bring your children up, by society's interference, more or less direct, through the schools and so on? The Communists did not invent the influence of society on education. They only change its character; they tear education away from the influence of a ruling class.

The bourgeois platitudes about the family and education, about the cherished bond between parent and child, grow all the more sickening the more large-scale industry tears apart every family tie among the proletarians and turns their children into simple articles of trade and instruments of labor.

But you Communists want to bring in the community of women, the whole bourgeoisie shrieks at us in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and naturally he can't imagine anything but that women will share the same fate of being held in common.

It never crosses his mind that the real point is precisely to do away with the position of women as mere instruments of production.

Nothing, for that matter, is more ridiculous than the high moral horror of our bourgeois at the official community of women the Communists are supposed to be planning. The Communists have no need to introduce the community of women. It has existed almost always.

Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, to say nothing of official prostitution, find their chief amusement in seducing one another's wives.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a community of wives. At most the Communists might be accused of wanting to replace a hypocritically hidden community of women with an official, frank one. For the rest, it goes without saying that with the abolition of the present relations of production, the community of women that springs from them, that is, prostitution official and unofficial, will disappear.²¹

The Communists have further been accused of wanting to abolish the fatherland, nationality.

The workers have no country. Nobody can take from them what they don't have. The proletariat has first to win political power, rise to be the national class and constitute itself as the nation; to that extent it is still national itself, if by no means in the bourgeois sense.

National divisions and antagonisms between peoples are already fading more and more with the development of the bourgeoisie, with free trade, with the world market, with the uniformity of industrial production and the conditions of life that go with it.

The rule of the proletariat will make them fade faster still. Joint action, at least by the civilized countries, is one of the first conditions of its liberation.

In the same measure as the exploitation of one individual by another is abolished, the exploitation of one nation by another will be abolished.

When the antagonism between classes within the nation goes, the hostility of one nation to another goes with it.

The charges brought against communism from a religious, a philosophical and in general an ideological point of view do not deserve any lengthy discussion.

Does it take deep insight to see that people's ideas, views and concepts, in a word their consciousness, change with the conditions of their life, with their social relations, with their social existence?

What does the history of ideas prove, if not that intellectual production is reshaped along with material production? The ruling ideas of any age have only ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

People talk of ideas that revolutionize a whole society. In saying so they merely state the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have taken shape, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps step with the dissolution of the old conditions of life.

When the ancient world was going under, the ancient religions were conquered by Christianity. When Christian ideas gave way in the eighteenth century to the ideas of the Enlightenment, feudal society was fighting its death struggle with the bourgeoisie, then the revolutionary class. The ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion only expressed the rule of free competition in the realm of conscience.

But, it will be said, religious, moral, philosophical, political and legal ideas and so on have of course been modified in the course of historical development. Religion, morality, philosophy, politics and law, though, have always survived these changes.

Besides, there are eternal truths, such as freedom, justice and so on, that are common to every state of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes religion and morality instead of giving them new form; it therefore runs counter to the whole of historical development so far.

What does this charge boil down to? The history of all society up to now has moved in class antagonisms, which took different shapes in different epochs.

But whatever shape they took, the exploitation of one part of society by another is a fact common to every past century. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of every century, for all its variety and diversity, moves within certain common forms, forms of consciousness that will dissolve completely only when class antagonism disappears altogether.

The communist revolution is the most radical break with traditional property relations; no wonder its development involves the most radical break with traditional ideas.

But enough of the bourgeoisie's objections to communism.

We have already seen above that the first step in the workers' revolution is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win democracy.

The proletariat will use its political rule to tear all capital away from the bourgeoisie, step by step; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, that is, of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as fast as possible.

At first, of course, this can be done only by despotic encroachments on the right of property and on bourgeois relations of production: by measures, then, that look economically inadequate and untenable, but that in the course of the movement drive on beyond themselves and are unavoidable as a means of transforming the whole mode of production.

These measures will of course differ from country to country.

For the most advanced countries, however, the following could be applied fairly generally:²²

1. Expropriation of landed property, and the use of ground rent for the expenses of the state.²³

2. A steep progressive tax.

3. Abolition of the right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.²⁴

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of all transportation in the hands of the state.

7. More national factories and instruments of production; the clearing and improvement of land according to a common plan.

8. Equal compulsion on all to work; the setting up of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture and industry; working toward the gradual removal of the antagonism between town and country.

10. Public and free education for all children. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with material production, and so on, and so on.

When, in the course of development, class differences have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of the associated individuals, public power will lose its political character. Political power in the true sense is the organized force of one class for keeping another down. If the proletariat, in its struggle against the bourgeoisie, is forced to unite as a class; if by a revolution it makes itself the ruling class, and as the ruling class abolishes the old relations of production by force, then together with these relations of production it abolishes the conditions for the existence of class antagonism, of classes in general, and with them its own rule as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, there will be 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

Their place in history made it the calling of the French and English aristocracies to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French July Revolution of 1830, and in the English reform movement, they had once more gone down before the hated upstart. Serious political struggle was out of the question now; a literary fight was all they had left. But even in literature the old Restoration slogans had become impossible. To win any sympathy the aristocracy had to seem to lose sight of its own interests and draw up its indictment of the bourgeoisie purely on behalf of the exploited working class. That way it kept for itself the pleasure of singing songs of abuse about its new master and murmuring more or less ominous prophecies into his ear.²⁵

So arose feudal socialism: half dirge, half satire, half echo of the past, half threat of the future; now and then striking the bourgeoisie to the heart with its bitter, witty, savaging verdicts, and always comic in its effect, through its utter inability to grasp the march of modern history.

They waved the proletarian's beggar's sack aloft like a flag, to rally the people behind them. But every time the people fell in behind, it caught sight of the old feudal coats of arms on their backsides, and broke up with loud and disrespectful laughter.

Some of the French Legitimists and Young England put on this entertainment.²⁶

When the feudal gentry prove that their brand of exploitation looked different from the bourgeois brand, they forget just one thing: that they exploited under circumstances and conditions quite different and now long outlived. When they show that the modern proletariat never existed under their rule, they forget just one thing: that the modern bourgeoisie was the necessary offspring of their own social order.

For that matter, they make so little secret of the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief charge against the bourgeoisie is exactly this: under its regime a class is growing up that will blow the whole old social order sky-high.

What they hold against the bourgeoisie is not so much that it produces a proletariat as that it produces a revolutionary proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in every act of violence against the working class; and in everyday life, for all their inflated phrases, they don't mind bending down to pick up the golden apples, and swapping loyalty, love and honor for a trade in sheep's wool, sugar beets and schnapps.²⁷

As the priest has always gone hand in hand with the feudal lord, so clerical socialism has gone hand in hand with feudal socialism.

Nothing is easier than giving Christian asceticism a socialist coat of paint. Didn't Christianity, too, thunder against private property, against marriage, against the state? Didn't it preach charity and begging in their place, celibacy and the mortification of the flesh, the monk's cell and the Church? Holy socialism is nothing but the holy water with which the priest sprinkles his blessing on the aristocrat's spite.

b. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy is not the only class that the bourgeoisie has overthrown, and whose conditions of life have withered and died in modern bourgeois society. The burghers of the medieval towns and the small peasants were the forerunners of the modern bourgeoisie. In countries less developed in industry and commerce, this class still vegetates on beside the rising bourgeoisie.

In the countries where modern civilization has developed, a new petty bourgeoisie has formed. It hovers between proletariat and bourgeoisie and keeps re-forming as a supplementary part of bourgeois society, but its members are forever being flung down into the proletariat by competition. As large-scale industry develops they can even see the hour coming when they will disappear altogether as an independent part of modern society, replaced in commerce, manufacture and farming by overseers and servants.

In countries like France, where the peasants make up far more than half the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should judge the bourgeois regime by the standard of the petty bourgeois and the small peasant, and take up the workers' cause from the petty-bourgeois point of view. That is how petty-bourgeois socialism took shape. Sismondi is the leader of this literature, not only for France but for England too.²⁸

This socialism took apart the contradictions in the modern relations of production with great sharpness. It stripped the economists' hypocritical varnish away. It proved beyond dispute the destructive effects of machinery and the division of labor; the concentration of capital and of landed property; overproduction; crises; the inevitable ruin of the small townsmen and peasants; 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 customs, old family relations, old nationalities.

In its positive content, however, this socialism wants either to restore the old means of production and exchange, and with them the old property relations and the old society; or else to cram the modern means of production and exchange back by force into the framework of the old property relations, a framework they have shattered and were bound to shatter. In either case it is at once reactionary and utopian.

Guilds in manufacture, patriarchal farming on the land: that is its last word.

In its later development this tendency has trailed off into a cowardly hangover.

c. German or True Socialism

The socialist and communist literature of France, which arose under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power and is the literary expression of the struggle against that power, was brought into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie there was just beginning its struggle against feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, half-philosophers and belletrists pounced greedily on this literature, forgetting only that when these writings immigrated from France, French conditions of life had not immigrated with them. Set down among German conditions, the French literature lost all immediate practical point and took on a purely literary air. It could only look like idle speculation about the true society, about the realization of the human essence. In the same way, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution meant no more than demands of "practical reason" in general, and the expressions of will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie meant in their eyes the laws of pure will, of will as it ought to be, of truly human will.²⁹

The whole labor of the German men of letters consisted in bringing the new French ideas into line with their old philosophical conscience, or rather in appropriating the French ideas from their own philosophical standpoint.

They appropriated them the way one appropriates any foreign language: by translating.

Everyone knows how monks wrote insipid lives of Catholic saints over the manuscripts that held the classic works of pagan antiquity. The German men of letters dealt with profane French literature the other way round. They wrote their philosophical nonsense behind the French original. For instance, behind the French critique of money relations they wrote "alienation of the human essence," behind the French critique of the bourgeois state they wrote "abolition of the rule of the abstract universal," and so on.³⁰

This trick of slipping their philosophical phrases in under the French arguments they christened "philosophy of action," "True Socialism," "German science of socialism," "philosophical foundation of socialism," and so on.

French socialist and communist literature was thus neatly castrated. And since in German hands it no longer expressed the struggle of one class against another, the German congratulated himself on having risen above French one-sidedness, on standing up not for true needs but for the need of truth, not for the interests of the proletarian but for the interests of the human essence, of Man in general: Man who belongs to no class, who does not belong to reality at all, only to the misty heaven of philosophical fantasy.

This German socialism, which took its clumsy schoolboy exercises so earnestly and solemnly, and cried them up like a fairground barker, did little by little lose its pedantic innocence.

The struggle of the German bourgeoisie, and above all the Prussian, against the feudal lords and absolute monarchy, in a word the liberal movement, grew more serious.

This handed True Socialism the chance it had been waiting for, to confront the political movement with socialist demands.

The chance to hurl the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against the representative state, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois law, bourgeois freedom and equality; and to preach to the mass of the people that they had nothing to gain from this bourgeois movement, and everything to lose. German socialism forgot, just in time, that the French criticism it echoed so mindlessly presupposed modern bourgeois society, with the material conditions of life that go with it and the political constitution to match: the very things that in Germany had still to be fought for.

For the absolute governments of Germany, with their train of priests, schoolmasters, cabbage squires and bureaucrats, it made a handy scarecrow to wave at the menacingly rising bourgeoisie.

It was the sweet sauce to go with the bitter whippings and musket balls these same governments served the German workers' risings.³¹

While True Socialism thus became a weapon in the hands of the governments against the German bourgeoisie, it also directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German small-town burghers. In Germany the petty bourgeoisie, handed down from the sixteenth century and constantly reappearing since then in various forms, is the real social foundation of the existing state of things.

To preserve it is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. It dreads the industrial and political rule of the bourgeoisie as its certain ruin, on the one hand through the concentration of capital, on the other through the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. True Socialism looked to it like a way of swatting both flies at once. It spread like an epidemic.

The garment spun from speculative spider's web, embroidered all over with the flowers of fine writing, soaked in the sultry dew of lovesick sentiment, this gushing garment in which the German socialists swaddled their handful of bony eternal truths, only helped their goods sell better with this public.

German socialism, for its part, saw more and more clearly that its vocation was to be the pompous mouthpiece of these small-town burghers.

It proclaimed the German nation the model nation and the German philistine the model human being. To his every meanness it gave a hidden, higher, socialist sense in which it meant the very opposite. It drew the final conclusion by coming out openly against the crudely destructive tendency of communism and announcing its own impartial loftiness above all class struggles. With very few exceptions, everything that circulates in Germany as supposedly socialist and communist writing belongs to the realm of this squalid, spineless literature.^32,33

2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism

One part of the bourgeoisie would like to remedy social abuses, so as to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

Here belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, people who would better the lot of the working classes, charity organizers, abolishers of cruelty to animals, founders of temperance leagues, backroom reformers of every gaudy stripe. This bourgeois socialism has even been worked up into complete systems.

As an example we cite Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty.³⁴

The socialist bourgeois want the conditions of life of modern society without the struggles and dangers that necessarily come with them. They want existing society minus the elements that revolutionize it and break it up. They want the bourgeoisie without the proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally pictures the world it rules as the best of worlds. Bourgeois socialism works this soothing picture up into half a system or a whole one. When it calls on the proletariat to put its systems into practice and so march into the New Jerusalem, all it is really asking is that the proletariat stay where it is, inside present-day society, and simply shed its spiteful ideas about it.

A second form of this socialism, less systematic and more practical, tried to spoil every revolutionary movement for the working class by showing that no political change of this kind or that could do it any good, only a change in the material conditions of life, in economic relations. By a change in the material conditions of life, however, this socialism by no means understands the abolition of bourgeois relations of production, which is possible only by revolution, but administrative improvements carried out on the basis of those very relations of production: improvements, therefore, that change nothing in the relation between capital and wage labor, but at best lower the bourgeoisie's cost of ruling and simplify its state budget.

Bourgeois socialism finds its proper expression only when it turns into a mere figure of speech.

Free trade! in the interest of the working class. Protective tariffs! in the interest of the working class. Prisons with solitary cells! in the interest of the working class. That is the last word of bourgeois socialism, and the only one it seriously means.³⁵

Their socialism comes down to the claim that the bourgeois are bourgeois, in the interest of the working class.

3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism

We are not speaking here of the literature that, in every great modern revolution, has given voice to the demands of the proletariat (the writings of Babeuf, and so on).³⁶

The proletariat's first attempts to push its own class interest through directly, in a time of general ferment, while feudal society was being overthrown, were bound to founder, on the undeveloped state of the proletariat itself and on the absence of the material conditions for its liberation, conditions that are only produced by the bourgeois epoch. The revolutionary literature that went with these first movements of the proletariat is necessarily reactionary in content. It teaches a universal asceticism and a crude leveling.

The socialist and communist systems properly so called, the systems of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and the rest, appear in the first, undeveloped period of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie that we described above. (See "Bourgeois and Proletarians.")³⁷

The inventors of these systems do see the antagonism of classes, as well as the working of the dissolving elements inside the ruling society itself. But they see on the side of the proletariat no historical activity of its own, no political movement peculiar to it.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps pace with the development of industry, they find no more sign of the material conditions for the liberation of the proletariat, and go looking for a social science, for social laws, that will create these conditions.

In place of social activity must come their own personal ingenuity; in place of the historical conditions of liberation, fantastic ones; in place of the gradual organization of the proletariat into a class, an organization of society hatched by themselves. For them, the history of the world to come resolves itself into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their plans for society.

They are, it is true, aware that in their plans they are mainly representing the interest of the working class as the class that suffers most. Only from this point of view, as the class that suffers most, does the proletariat exist for them.

But the undeveloped state of the class struggle, and their own position in life, lead them to think themselves far above that class antagonism. They want to better the condition of every member of society, the best off included. And so they keep appealing to society at large, without distinction, and by preference to the ruling class. After all, you have only to understand their system to see that it is the best possible plan for the best possible society.

They therefore reject all political action, and above all revolutionary action; they want to reach their goal by peaceful means, and try to clear the way for the new social gospel by small experiments, which naturally fail, and by the power of example.

This fantastic picture of the future society answers, at a time when the proletariat is still very undeveloped and so still sees its own position fantastically, to the proletariat's first dim, presentient longing for a general reshaping of society.

But the socialist and communist writings also contain critical elements. They attack every foundation of existing society. They have therefore supplied highly valuable material for the enlightenment of the workers. Their positive proposals about the society of the future, such as the abolition of the antagonism between town and country, of the family, of private gain, of wage labor, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the state into a mere administration of production: all these proposals express only the disappearance of the class antagonism that is just beginning to develop, and that they know only in its first shapeless, indistinct form. These proposals themselves therefore still have a purely utopian meaning.

The importance of critical-utopian socialism and communism stands in inverse proportion to historical development. In the same measure as the class struggle develops and takes shape, this fantastic soaring above it, this fantastic combat with it, loses all practical value and all theoretical justification. However revolutionary the founders of these systems were in many respects, their disciples have therefore formed reactionary sects every time. They cling to their masters' old views in the face of the historical progress of the proletariat. They consistently try, therefore, to deaden the class struggle again and to reconcile the antagonisms. They still dream of trying out their social utopias, of founding a phalanstery here and there, setting up home colonies, establishing a little Icaria, a pocket edition of the New Jerusalem; and to build all these castles in Spain they have to appeal to the philanthropy of bourgeois hearts and moneybags. Little by little they sink into the category of the reactionary or conservative socialists described above, and differ from them only by a more systematic pedantry and by their fanatical superstition about the miracle-working powers of their social science.^38,39

They are therefore bitterly against every political movement of the workers, which in their eyes could only spring from blind unbelief in the new gospel.

The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France react, the first against the Chartists, the second against the Reformists.⁴⁰

IV. The Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties

After Section II, the relation of the Communists to the workers' parties already formed goes without saying: their relation, that is, to the Chartists in England and the agrarian reformers in North America.⁴¹

The Communists fight for the working class's immediate aims and interests, but in the movement of today they stand for the movement's future as well. In France the Communists join the Socialist-Democratic party against the conservative and the radical bourgeoisie, while keeping the right to be critical of the phrases and illusions handed down from the revolutionary tradition.^42,43

In Switzerland they back the Radicals, while fully aware that this party is made up of contradictory elements, some of them democratic socialists in the French sense, some of them radical bourgeois.⁴⁴

Among the Poles the Communists support the party that makes an agrarian revolution the condition of national liberation. It is the same party that set off the Kraków insurrection of 1846.⁴⁵

In Germany, as soon as the bourgeoisie takes the revolutionary road, the Communist Party fights side by side with it against the absolute monarchy, the feudal landowners and the petty bourgeoisie.

But not for one moment does it neglect to drive home to the workers, as clearly as it can, the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The German workers must be ready to turn the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie is bound to bring in with its rule straight into so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, so that the fight against the bourgeoisie itself can begin the moment the reactionary classes in Germany have fallen.

The Communists turn their chief attention to Germany, because Germany is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, and because it will carry out that upheaval under more advanced conditions of European civilization as a whole, and with a far more developed proletariat, than England in the seventeenth century or France in the eighteenth. The German bourgeois revolution, then, can only be the immediate prelude to a proletarian revolution.⁴⁶

In a word, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions.

In all these movements they put the property question in the foreground, whatever stage of development it may have reached, as the fundamental question of the movement.

Finally, the Communists work everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists will not stoop to hiding their views and intentions. They say openly that their ends can be reached only by the forcible overthrow of the whole social order that has existed until now. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose in it but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workers of all countries, unite!