Manifesto of the Communist Party
#PUBLICATION NOTE
This edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published in the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, First English Edition, Vols. 6, 23, 24, 26, and 27, Lawrence & Wishart, London.
#INTRODUCTION NOTE
This is the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the programmatic document drafted by Comrades Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for the Communist League in London, England, United Kingdom between the 8th of December, 1847 and the 31st of January, 1848. It was first published as a separate pamphlet in February 1848.
The Manifesto was written by Comrades Marx and Engels as the programme of the Communist League on the decision of its Second Congress, which was held in London between the 29th of November and 8th of December, 1847, and which signified a victory for the followers of the new proletarian doctrine who had upheld its principles during the discussion of the programmatic questions.
When the Congress was still in preparation, Comrades Marx and Engels arrived at the conclusion that the final programmatic document should be in the form of a Party Manifesto. The catechismic form usual for the secret societies of the time and retained in the Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith and The Principles of Communism was not suitable for a full and substantial exposition of the new Communist worldview and for a comprehensive formulation of the aims and tasks of the proletarian movement.
Comrades Marx and Engels began working together on the Manifesto while they were still in London immediately after the Congress, and continued until around the 13th of December, when Marx returned to Brussels; they resumed their work four days later, on the 17th of December, when Engels arrived there. After Engels's departure for Paris at the end of December and until his return on the 31st of January, Marx worked on the Manifesto alone.
Hurried by the Central Authority of the Communist League, which provided him with certain documents (for example, addresses of the People's Chamber of the League of the Just of November 1846 and February 1847, and, apparently, documents of the First Congress of the Communist League pertaining to the discussion of the Party Programme), Comrade Marx worked intensively on the Manifesto through almost the whole of January 1848. At the end of January, the manuscript was sent on to London to be printed in the printshop of the German Workers' Educational Society, which was owned by the German migrant J.E. Burghard, a member of the Communist League.
The Manifesto came off the press at the end of February 1848. On the 29th of February, the Educational Society decided to cover all the printing expenses.
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#PREFACE TO THE 1872 GERMAN EDITION
#Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
#24th of June, 1872
#★
The Communist League,1 an international association of workers, which could, of course, only be an underground one under the conditions existing at the time, commissioned the undersigned, at the Congress held in London in November 1847, to draw up for publication a detailed theoretical and practical Party Programme. Such was the origin of the following Manifesto, the manuscript of which traveled to London, to be printed, a few weeks before the French February Revolution of 1848. First published in German, it has been republished in that language in at least 12 different editions in Germany, England, and the United States. It was published in English for the first time in 1850 in The Red Republican, London, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and, in 1871, in at least three different translations in the United States. A French version first appeared in Paris shortly before the June Uprising of 1848 and recently in Le Socialiste [The Socialist] of New York. A new translation is in the course of preparation. A Polish version appeared in London shortly after it was first published in German. A Russian translation was published in Geneva in the 1860s. Into Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its first appearance.
However much the state of things may have altered during the last 25 years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the existing historical conditions, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section 2. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of modern industry in the last 25 years, and of the accompanying improved and extended Party organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first, in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has, in some details, become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, that is to say, that «the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes».2 Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of Socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also, that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section 4), although in principle still correct, in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the Earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.
But, then, the Manifesto has become a historical document, which we have no longer any right to alter. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with an introduction bridging the gap from 1847 to the present day; this reprint was too unexpected to leave us time for that.
#Karl Marx
#Friedrich Engels
#London
#24th of June, 1872
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#PREFACE TO THE 1882 RUSSIAN EDITION
#Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
#21st of January, 1882
#★
The First Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was published early in the 1860s by the printing office of the Kolokol [Bell]. At that time, the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement still occupied at that time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section of the Manifesto on the standpoint of the Communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties in different countries.. Russia and the United States of all places are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through emigration. Both countries supplied Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for its industrial products. At that time, both were, therefore, in one way or another, pillars of the existing European order.
How very different today! It was precisely European immigration that enabled North America to attain gigantic agricultural production, competition from which is shaking the very foundations of European landed property — large and small. Moreover, it enabled the United States to make use of its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the prevailing industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England. Both circumstances react in revolutionary manner upon the United States itself. Step by step, the smaller and middle landownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; simultaneously, a numerous proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital are developing for the first time in the industrial regions.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-49, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat, which was just beginning to awaken, in Russian intervention. The Tsar [Nikolaj the First] was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he [Aleksandr the Third] is a prisoner of war of the revolution, in Gatcina,3 and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had as its object the proclamation of the inevitably impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But, in Russia, we find, face to face with the rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property, which is just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now, the question is: Can the Russian obsina [village community], a form of primitive-communal ownership of land, even if greatly undermined, pass directly to the higher form of communist public ownership? Or must it, conversely, first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical development of the West?
The only answer possible today is this: If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development.
#Karl Marx
#Friedrich Engels
#London
#21st of January, 1882
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#PREFACE TO THE 1883 GERMAN EDITION
#Friedrich Engels
#28th of June, 1883
#★
The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the person to whom the whole working class of Europe and North America owes more than to anyone else, rests at Highgate Cemetery, and over his grave, the first grass is already growing. Since his death, there can even be less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. All the more do I consider it necessary again to state here the following expressly:
The fundamental thought running through the Manifesto — that economic production and the social structure of every historical epoch necessarily arising from it constitute the basis for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that, consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primitive-communal ownership of land), all history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploited, between oppressed and oppressing classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie) without, at the same time, forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, and class struggles — this fundamental thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.4
I have already stated this many times; but precisely now, it is necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.
#F. Engels
#London
#28th of June, 1883
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#PREFACE TO THE 1888 ENGLISH EDITION
#Friedrich Engels
#30th of January, 1888
#★
The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a workers' association, first exclusively German, later on international, and, under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At the Congress of the League, held in London in November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare for publication a complete theoretical and practical Party Programme. Drawn up in German in January 1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French revolution of the 24th of February. A French translation was brought out in Paris shortly before the June Uprising of 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney's Red Republican, London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been published.
The defeat of the Parisian June Uprising of 1848 — the first great battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie — drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class. From then on, the struggle for supremacy was again, as it had been before the February Revolution, solely between different factions of the propertied class; the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of the bourgeois Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus, the Prussian police hunted out the Central Authority of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested, and, after 18 months' imprisonment, they were tried in October 1852. This celebrated «Cologne Communist Trial» lasted from the 4th of October until the 12th of November; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately after the sentence, the League was formally dissolved by the remaining members. As to the Manifesto, it seemed from then on to be doomed to oblivion.
When the European working class had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling classes, the International Workers' Association sprang up. But this association, formed with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and North America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto. The International was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleites5 in Germany. Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes of the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to people's minds the insufficiency of their various favourite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions of working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking up in 1874, left the workers quite different people from what it had found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France and Lassalleanism in Germany were dying out, and even the Conservative English trade unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with the International, were gradually advancing toward that point at which, last year at Swansea, their President [W. Bevan] could say, in their name: «Continental Socialism has lost its terrors for us.» In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the workers of all countries.
The Manifesto itself thus came to the front again. The German text had been, since 1850, reprinted several times in Switzerland, England, and the United States. In 1872, it was translated into English in New York, where the translation was published in Woodhull and Chaflin's Weekly. From this English version, a French one was made in The Socialist of New York. Since then, at least two more English translations, more or less mutilated, have been brought out in the United States, and one of them has been reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin, was published at Herzen's Bell office in Geneva, around 1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulic, also in Geneva, 1882.6 A new Danish edition is to be found in Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek [Social-Democratic Library], Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation in The Socialist, Paris, 1886. From this latter, a Castilian version was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted, there have been 12 altogether at least. An Armenian translation, which was to be published in Istanbul some months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator declined to call it their own production. Of further translations into other languages, I have heard, but have not seen them. Thus, the history of the Manifesto reflects, to a great extent, the history of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is undoubtedly the most widespread, the most international production of all Socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of workers from Siberia to California.
Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierites in France,7 both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances — in both cases, people outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the «educated» classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough among the working class to produce the Utopian Communism, in France, of Cabet, and, in Germany, of Weitling. Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, a bourgeois movement, Communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, «respectable»; Communism was the very opposite. And, as our notion, from the very beginning, was that «the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself»,8 there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must name. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.
The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that, in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis on which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that, consequently, the whole of human history (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between the exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class — the proletariat — cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class — the bourgeoisie — without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions, and class struggles.
This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed toward it is best shown by my The Condition of the Working Class in England. But, when I again met Marx at Brussels in the spring of 1845, he had it ready worked out, and put it in front of me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.
From our joint preface to the 1872 German Edition, I quote the following:
However much the state of things may have altered during the last 25 years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the existing historical conditions, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section 2. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of modern industry in the last 25 years, and of the accompanying improved and extended Party organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first, in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has, in some details, become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, that is to say, that «the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes».2 Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of Socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also, that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section 4), although in principle still correct, in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the Earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.
But, then, the Manifesto has become a historical document, which we have no longer any right to alter.
The present translation is by Mr. Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater portion of Marx's Capital. We have revised it in common, and I have added a few notes explanatory of historical allusions.
#Friedrich Engels
#London
#30th of January, 1888
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#PREFACE TO THE 1890 GERMAN EDITION
#Friedrich Engels
#1st of May, 1890
#★
Since the Preface to the 1883 German Edition was written, a new German edition of the Manifesto has again become necessary, and much has also happened to the Manifesto which should be recorded here.
A second Russian translation — by Vera Zasulic — appeared in Geneva in 1882; the preface to that edition was written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately, the original German manuscript has gone astray; I must therefore retranslate from the Russian, which will in no way improve the text. It reads:
The First Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was published early in the 1860s by the printing office of the Bell. At that time, the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement still occupied at that time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section of the Manifesto: the attitude of the Communists in relation to the different opposition parties in various countries. Russia and the United States of all places are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through emigration. Both countries supplied Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for its industrial products. At that time, both were, therefore, in one way or another, pillars of the existing European order.
How very different today! It was precisely European immigration that enabled North America to attain gigantic agricultural production, competition from which is shaking the very foundations of European landed property — large and small. Moreover, it enabled the United States to make use of its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the prevailing industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England. Both circumstances react in revolutionary manner upon the United States itself. Step by step, the smaller and middle landownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; simultaneously, a numerous proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital are developing for the first time in the industrial regions.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-49, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat, which was just beginning to awaken, in Russian intervention. The Tsar [Nikolaj the First] was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he [Aleksandr the Third] is a prisoner of war of the revolution, in Gatcina, and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had as its object the proclamation of the inevitably impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But, in Russia, we find, face to face with the rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property, which is just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now, the question is: Can the Russian obsina [village community], a form of primitive-communal ownership of land, even if greatly undermined, pass directly to the higher form of communist public ownership? Or must it, conversely, first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical development of the West?
The only answer possible today is this: If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development.
At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva.
Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the Social-Democratic Library, Copenhagen, 1885. Unfortunately, it is not quite complete; certain essential passages, which seem to have presented difficulties to the translator, have been omitted, and, in addition, there are signs of carelessness here and there, which are all the more unpleasantly conspicuous, since the translation indicates that, had the translator taken a little more pains, they would have done an excellent piece of work.
A new French version appeared in 1886 in The Socialist of Paris; it is the best publication to date.
After this, a Castilian version was published the same year, first, in The Socialist of Madrid, and then reissued in pamphlet form.
As a matter of curiosity, I may also mention that, in 1887, the manuscript of an Armenian translation was offered to a publisher in Istanbul. But the good person did not have the courage to publish something bearing the name of Marx, and suggested that the translator set down their own name as author, which the latter, however, declined.
After one and then another of the more or less inaccurate translations from the United States had been repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version at last appeared in 1888. This was by my friend Samuel Moore, and we went through it together once more before it was sent to the press. I have added some of the notes of that edition to the present one.
The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with enthusiasm, at the time of its appearance, by the still not at all numerous vanguard of Scientific Socialism (as is proved by the translations mentioned in the Preface to the 1872 German Edition), it was soon forced into the background by the reactionary developments that originated with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally excommunicated «according to law» by the conviction of the Cologne Communists in November 1852.9 With the disappearance from the public scene of the workers' movement that had begun with the French February Revolution of 1848, the Manifesto passed into the background.
When the working class of Europe had again gathered sufficient strength for a new onslaught on the power of the ruling classes, the International Workers' Association came into being. Its aim was to weld together into one huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and North America. Therefore, it could not set out from the principles laid down in the Manifesto. It was bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on the English trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish Proudhonites, and the German Lassalleites.10 This programme — the Inaugural Address of the International Workers' Association — was drawn up by Marx with a master hand acknowledged even by Bakunin and the Anarchists. For the ultimate triumph of the ideas put forward in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely and exclusively on the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had to ensure from united action and discussion. The events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the successes, could not but demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy until then of their universal panaceas and make their minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for the emancipation of the workers. And Marx was right. The working class of 1874, at the dissolution of the International, was altogether different from that of 1864, at its foundation. Proudhonism in the Latin countries and the specific Lassalleanism in Germany were dying out, and even the then arch-Conservative English trade unions were gradually approaching the point where, in 1887, the President [W. Bevan] of their Swansea Congress could say in their name: «Continental Socialism has lost its terrors for us.» Yet, by 1887, Continental Socialism was almost exclusively the theory heralded in the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent, the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement since 1848. At present, it is doubtless the most widely circulated, the most international product of all Socialist literature, the common programme of many millions of workers of all countries, from Siberia to California.
Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were considered Socialists. On the one hand were the adherents of the various Utopian systems, notably, the Owenites in England and the Fourierites in France, both of whom at that date had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out. On the other, the manifold types of social quacks, who wanted to eliminate social abuses through their various universal panaceas and all kinds of patchwork, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, people who stood outside the labour movement and who looked for support rather to the «educated» classes. The faction of the working class, however, which demanded a radical reconstruction of society, convinced that mere political revolutions were not enough, then called itself Communist. It was still a rough-hewn, only instinctive, and frequently somewhat crude Communism. Yet it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of Utopian Communism — in France, the «Icarian» Communism of Cabet, and, in Germany, that of Weitling. Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois movement; Communism, a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite respectable, whereas Communism was the very opposite. And, since we were very decidedly of the opinion as early as then that «the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself»,8 we could have no hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor has it ever occurred to us since to repudiate it.
«Proletarians of all countries, unite!» But few voices responded when we proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the first Paris revolution, in which the proletariat came out with demands of its own. On the 28th of September, 1864, however, the proletarians of most of the Western European countries joined hands in the International Workers' Association of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived only nine years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and North American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour workday to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers' Congress in 1889.11 And today's spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that, today, the proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!
#F. Engels
#London
#1st of May, 1890
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#PREFACE TO THE 1892 POLISH EDITION
#Friedrich Engels
#10th of February, 1892
#★
The fact that a new Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto has become necessary gives rise to various thoughts.
First of all, it is noteworthy that, of late, the Manifesto has become an index, as it were, of the development of large-scale industry on the European Continent. In proportion as large-scale industry expands in a given country, the demand grows among the workers of that country for enlightenment regarding their position as the working class in relation to the possessing classes, the Socialist movement spreads among them, and the demand for the Manifesto increases. Thus, not only the state of the labour movement, but also the degree of development of large-scale industry, can be measured with fair accuracy in every country by the number of copies of the Manifesto circulated in the language of that country.
Accordingly, the new Polish edition indicates a decided progress of Polish industry. And there can be no doubt whatsoever that this progress since the previous edition published ten years ago has actually taken place. The Kingdom of Poland, Congress Poland,12 has become the big industrial region of the Russian Empire. Whereas Russian large-scale industry is scattered sporadically — a part around the Gulf of Finland, another in the centre (Moscow and Vladimir), a third along the coasts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, an still others elsewhere — Polish industry has been packed into a relatively small area and enjoys both the advantages and the disadvantages arising from such concentration. The competing Russian manufacturers acknowledged the advantages when they demanded protective tariffs against Poland,13 in spite of their ardent desire to transform the Poles into Russians. The disadvantages — for the Polish manufacturers and the Russian government — are manifest in the rapid spread of Socialist ideas among the Polish workers and in the growing demand for the Manifesto.
But the rapid development of Polish industry, outstripping that of Russia, is, in its turn, a new proof of the inexhaustible vitality of the Polish people and a new guarantee of its impending national restoration. And the restoration of an independent, strong Poland is a matter which concerns, not only the Poles, but all of us. A sincere international collaboration of the European nations is possible only if each of these nations is fully autonomous in its own house. The Revolution of 1848, which, under the banner of the proletariat, after all, merely let the proletarian fighters do the work of the bourgeoisie, secured the independence of Italy, Germany, and Hungary, among other things, through Louis Bonaparte and Bismarck, its testamentary executioners; but Poland, which, since 1792, had done more for the revolution than all these three together, was left to its own resources when it succumbed, in 1863, to a ten-fold greater Russian force. The nobility could neither maintain nor regain Polish independence; today, to the bourgeoisie, this independence is, to say the least, immaterial. Nevertheless, it is a necessity for the harmonious collaboration of the European nations. It can be gained only by the young Polish proletariat, and in its hands it is secure. For the workers of all the rest of Europe need the independence of Poland just as much as the Polish workers themselves.
#F. Engels
#London
#10th of February, 1892
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#TO THE ITALIAN READER
#PREFACE TO THE 1893 ITALIAN EDITION
#Friedrich Engels
#1st of February, 1893
#★
The publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party coincided, one may say, with the 18th of March, 1848, the day of the revolutions in Milan and Berlin, which were armed uprisings of the two nations situated in the centre, the one, of the continent of Europe, and the other, of the Mediterranean; two nations until then enfeebled by division and internal strife, and thus fallen under foreign domination. While Italy was subject to the Emperor of Austria, Germany underwent the yoke, not less effective though more indirect, of the Tsar of Russia. The consequences of the 18th of March, 1848 freed both Italy and Germany from this disgrace; if, from 1848 to '71, these two great nations were reconstituted and somehow again put on their own, it was, as Karl Marx used to say, because the people who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were, nevertheless, its testamentary executioners in spite of themselves.14
Everywhere, that revolution was the work of the working class; it was the latter that built the barricades and paid with its lifeblood. Only the Paris workers, in overthrowing the government, had the very definite intention of overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But, conscious though they were of the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the masses of French workers had as yet reached the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In the final analysis, therefore, the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class. In the other countries — in Italy, Germany, and Austria — the workers, from the very outset, did nothing but raise the bourgeoisie to power. But, in any country, the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible without national independence. Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the unity and autonomy of the nations that had lacked them up to then: Italy, Germany, and Hungary. Poland will follow in turn.
Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved the way, prepared the ground for the latter. Through the impetus given to large-scale industry in all countries, the bourgeois regime during the last 45 years has everywhere created a numerous, concentrated, and powerful proletariat. It has thus raised, to use the language of the Manifesto, its own grave-diggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to achieve either the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent cooperation of these nations toward common aims. Just imagine joint international action by the Italian, Hungarian, German, Polish, and Russian workers under the political conditions preceding 1848!
The battles fought in 1848 were thus not fought in vain. Nor have the 45 years separating us from that revolutionary epoch passed to no purpose. The fruits are ripening, and all I wish is that the publication of this Italian translation may augur as well for the victory of the Italian proletariat as the publication of the original did for the international revolution.
The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism in the past. The first capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era, are marked by a colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?
#Friedrich Engels
#London
#1st of February, 1893
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
#Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
#December 1847-January 1848
#★
#INTRODUCTION
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a Holy Alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.
Where is the opposition party that has not been decried as Communist by its ruling opponents? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism against the more progressive opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
- First, Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
- Second, it is high time that the Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, aims, and tendencies and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the Party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Danish languages.
#1. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS15
The history of all previously existing society16 is the history of class struggles.
Freeperson and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master17 and journeyperson, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open struggle, a struggle that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In Ancient Rome, we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeypeople, 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 only established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burghers, the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of the Americas, the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of the Americas, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange, and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, navigation, and industry and impulse never before known, and, thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by feudal guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meanwhile, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture 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 whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of the Americas paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, navigation, and communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and, in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, and 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 exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune;18 19 here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable «Third Estate» of the monarchy (as in France), afterward, in the period of manufacture property, serving either the estate monarchy 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 only 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, paternal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn apart the motley feudal ties that bound people to their «natural superiors», and has left remaining no other nexus between people than naked self-interest than callous «cash payment». It had drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, chivalrous enthusiasm, and 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 a 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 until now honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, lawyer, priest, poet, and scientist into its paid wage-labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere monetary relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what human 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 means 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 revolutionization of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, and 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 people are at last compelled to face with sober senses their real living conditions and their relations to each other.
The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie all over the glove. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and 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 developed 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 glove. In place of the old needs, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new needs, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have interaction in every direction, universal interdependence 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 means of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most backward, nations into social development. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese Walls, with which it forces the backward peoples' 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, that is, to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the countryside to the rule of the cities. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural one, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the countryside dependent on the cities, so it has made backward and semi-backward countries dependent on the developed 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, the means of production, and property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or only 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 interest, one border, and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations put together. Subjection of nature's forces to humanity, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see, then, that the means of production and exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were created in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacture, in a word, the feudal relations of property, became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became fetters on production instead of developing it. They had to burst apart; they were burst apart.
In their place emerged free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by 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, exchange, and property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world which they have called up by their spells. For many decades at this point, the history of industry and commerce has only been the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises, a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out a social epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary backwardness; 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 development, too many means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further bourgeois social development and the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and, as 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 threw 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 people who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class, the proletariat.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, that is, capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers who live only as long as they find work, and who find work only as long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the worker. They become an appendage to the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of them. Hence, the cost of production of a worker is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that they require for their maintenance, and for the propagation of their kin. But the price of a commodity, and, therefore, also of labour,20 is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Moreover, in proportion as the use of machinery and the division of labour increases, in the same proportion the quantity of labour also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, increase of the work exacted in a given time, increased speed of the machinery, and so on.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the paternal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, 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 the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, the overseer, and, above all, the individual bourgeois manufacturer themself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, hateful, and embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry develops, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women and children. Differences of age and gender have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and gender.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, and they receive their wages in cash, than they are set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie: the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, and so on.
The lower strata of the former middle class — the small merchants, shopkeepers, retired merchants generally, handicraftspeople, 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 big 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 against the bourgeoisie. At first, the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workers of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploit them. They direct their attacks, not only against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported commodities that compete with their labour, they smash machinery to pieces, they set factories ablaze, and they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the worker of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered across the 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, a class which, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is, moreover, still, 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 small bourgeoisie. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But, with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and living conditions within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual worker 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 lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to 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 proletarians, 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 by the competition between the workers themselves. But it always rises up again, stronger, firmer, and mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the Ten Hours' Bill in England was carried.21
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, against the aristocracy; later on, against those portions of the bourgeoisie itself whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, against the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and, thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own 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 section of the ruling classes are, by the advances 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 education and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact, within the whole range of the old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character that a small faction of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, in an earlier period, a faction of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now, a section of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and, in particular, a faction of the bourgeois ideologues, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower-middle class — the small manufacturer, shopkeeper, handicraftsperson, and peasant — all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save from extinction their existence as sections of the middle class. They are, therefore, not revolutionary, but conservative. Moreover, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend, not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to take that of the proletariat.
The lumpen-proletariat, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest strata 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 conditions of the proletariat, those of the old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; their relation to their spouse and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in the United States as in Germany, has stripped them of every trace of national character. Law, morality, and religion are to them only 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 social productive forces without 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 fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, private 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 all the higher strata of official society being blown up.
Though not in substance, but in form, 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 settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we have 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 rule of the proletariat.
Until now, every social formation 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 themself to membership in the commune, just as the small bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper belong the conditions of existence of their own class. They become 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 on society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule, because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slaves within their slavery, because it cannot help letting them sink into such a state that it has to feed them instead of being fed by them. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential condition for the existence and rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of individuals, that is, the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
#2. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletariat as a whole?
The Communists do not form a sectarian political party opposed to other working-class political parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class political parties by this only:
- First, 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.
- Second, 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 progressive and resolute faction of the working-class political parties of every country, that faction which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great masses of proletarian the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, conditions, and final general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian political parties: the formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrown of bourgeois rule, and the 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 before 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 resulting from changes in historical conditions.
The French revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a person's own labour, property which is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the small handicraftsperson and of the poor peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, that is, that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except on condition of creating a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both aspects 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, or, rather, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is, therefore, not a personal, but rather a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, that is, that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely necessary to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of their labour merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human live, and that leaves no surplus with which to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only insofar as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is only a means to increase accumulated labour. In communist society, accumulated labour is only a means to widen, enrich, and promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappear, free selling and buying disappear also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other «brave words» of the bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered merchants of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the communist abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But, in your existing society, private property is already done away with for 9/10 of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those 9/10. 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 a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, that is, 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 capitalist owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way and made impossible.
Communism deprives no one of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive them of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.
It has been objected that, after the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is only another expression of the tautology that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the communist mode of producing and appropriating material products have, in the same way, been urged against the communist modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class education is to them identical with the disappearance of all education.
That education, the loss of which they lament, 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, education, law, and so on. Your very ideas are only the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is only the will of your class made into a law for all, a law whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and reason the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property — historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production — this misconception you share with every ruling class that has already perished. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime, we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most sacred of relations when we replace homeschooling by social education.
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, and so on? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they only 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 sacred co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn apart, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce public ownership of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois see in women mere means of production. They hear that the means of production are to be made use of in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
They do not even suspect that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere means of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the public ownership of women, which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce public ownership of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common, and, thus, at most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, instead of a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized public ownership of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the public ownership of women springing from that system, that is, of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.
The workers have no homeland. We cannot take from them what they do not have. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political power, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, freedom of commerce, the world market, and uniformity in the mode of production and the conditions of life corresponding to it.
The rule of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading developed countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, philosophical, and generally ideological standpoint do not deserve serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that people's ideas, views, and conceptions, in a word, people's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of their material existence, social relations, and 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 always been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they only express the fact that, within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to the rationalist ideas of the Enlightenment, 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.
It will be said: «Undoubtedly, religious, moral philosophical, and judicial 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, and so on that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of reconstituting them; 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 in different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, that is to say, 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 of consciousness or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us be 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 power to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all means 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 rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic restrictions on property rights and the bourgeois conditions of production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further restrictions of 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 the most developed countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable:
- First, expropriation of landed property and application of all ground rent to public purposes.
- Second, a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
- Third, abolition of all right of inheritance.
- Fourth, confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
- Fifth, centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
- Sixth, centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the State.
- Seventh, extension of factories and means of production owned by the State; the cultivation of wasteland, and the improvement of the soil generally, in accordance with a common plan.
- Eighth, equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
- Ninth, combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between city and countryside, by a more equable distribution of the population across the country.
- Tenth, free education for all children in public schools; abolition of children's factory labour in its present form; combination of education with industrial production; and so on, and so forth.
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, State 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, in its contest with the bourgeoisie, is compelled, by 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 rule 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.
#3. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE
#3.1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM
#3.1.1. FEUDAL SOCIALISM
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French July Revolution of 1830, and in the English Reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. From then on, a serious political contest was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But, even in the domain of literature, the old cries of the Restoration period22 had become impossible.
In order to awaken sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master and whispering in their ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty, and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, as often as it joined them, saw on their behinds the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
One faction of the French Legitimists and of «Young England»23 exhibited this spectacle.
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forgot 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 forgot that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own social formation.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this: that, under the bourgeois regime, a class is being developed which is destined to cut up root and branch the old social order.
What they blame the bourgeoisie for is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and, in ordinary life, despite their high-highfalutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot sugar, and potato spirits.24
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the feudal lord, 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, marriage, and the State? Has it not preached, instead of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is only the holy water with which the priest consecrates the passions of the aristocrat.
#3.1.2. SMALL-BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The mediaeval burghers and small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are only little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern society has become fully developed, a new class of small bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie and constantly renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufacture, agriculture, and commerce, by overseers, bailiffs, and shopkeepers.
In countries like France and Switzerland, 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 small bourgeois, and, from the standpoint of these middle classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose small-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France and Switzerland, but also in England.
This school of Socialism dissected with great sharpness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of the economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and the division of labour, the concentration of capital and land in a few hands, and overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the small 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, and the dissolution of old moral bonds, old family relations, and old nationalities.
In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and exchange, and, with them, the old property relations and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and exchange into the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, blown up by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; paternal relations in agriculture.
In the end, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues.
#3.1.3. GERMAN OR «TRUE» SOCIALISM
The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and lovers of fine phrases eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that, when these writings migrated from France to Germany, French social conditions did not migrate along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect. It must have appeared as idle speculation on true society, on the realization of humanity. Thus, to the German philosophers of the 18th century, the demands of the first French revolution were nothing more than the demands of «practical reason»25 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 works 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 philosophical standpoint.
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 on.
The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely castrated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class against the other, they 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 the human being in general, which belongs to no class, has no reality, which exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
This German Socialism, which took its schoolchild task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the German and, especially, the Prussian bourgeoisie against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the Liberal movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long-awaited opportunity was offered to «True» Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against Liberalism, representative government, bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, and bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose from 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 material conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted to it, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the German absolutist governments, with their following of parsons, professors, Junkers, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets, with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class uprisings.
While this «True» Socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German philistines. In Germany, the small-bourgeois class, a relic of the 16th century, and since then constantly cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political rule 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 commodities among such a public.
And, on its part, German Socialism recognized more and more its own calling as the bombastic representative of the small-bourgeois philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German small-bourgeois philistine to be the typical human being. To every villainous meanness of this model human being, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialist interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the «brutally destructive» tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.26
#3.2. CONSERVATIVE OR BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM
A part of the bourgeoisie desires to redress social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this faction belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, animal rights activists, and 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 The Philosophy of Poverty as an example of this form.
The Socialist bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting from them. 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 of 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 only requires, in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of the existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at 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 — to the benefit of the working class. Protective duties — to the benefit of the working class. Solitary confinement — to 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 — to the benefit of the working class.
#3.3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then-undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social leveling in its crudest form.
The Socialist and Communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing social formation. But the proletariat, still 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 for a new social science, for 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 fantastical ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class organization of the proletariat to an organization of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propagation and the practical execution of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring mainly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; moreover, they prefer to appeal to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan for the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political and, especially, all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.
Such fantastical pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has only 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 city and countryside, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, of private profit, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production — all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms, which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are 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 fantastical standing apart from the contest, these fantastical attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold on to the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour 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», of setting up a «Little Icaria»27 28 — 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 or conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.
The Owenites in England and the Fourierites in France respectively oppose the Chartists and the Reformists.29
#4. STANDPOINT OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES
Section 2 has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class political parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in the United States.30
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but, in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.
In France, the Communists ally themselves with the Social-Democrats31 32 against the Conservative and Radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take a critical standpoint in relation to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the Great Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this political party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Social-Democrats, in the French sense, partly of bourgeois Radicals.
In Poland, they support the political party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the main condition for national emancipation, the political party that fomented the Cracow Uprising in 1846.33
In Germany, they fight together with the bourgeoisie, whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal Junkers, and the small-bourgeois philistines.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may right away use, as weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its rule, 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 progressive conditions of European social development, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the 17th century, and than that of France was in the 18th century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be only 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 work everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic political 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 violent 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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Editor's Note: The Communist League was the first international Communist organization of the proletariat, formed under the leadership of Comrades Marx and Engels in London early in June 1847, as a result of the reorganization of the League of the Just (a secret society of workers and handicraftspeople that appeared in the 1830s and had communities in Germany, France, Switzerland, England, and Sweden). The programme and organizational principles of the Communist League were drawn up with the direct participation of Marx and Engels. The League's members took an active part in the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany in 1848-49- In the summer of 1850, disagreements arose in the League between the supporters of Marx and Engels, on the one hand, and the Willich-Schapper «Left»-opportunist line, on the other, which tried to impose on the League sectarianism and the adventurist tactic of embarking on revolution immediately, irrespective of the actual situation. The discord resulted in a split within the League. Owing to police persecution and arrests of League members in May 1851, the activities of the Communist League as an organization in Germany practically ceased. On the 17th of November, 1852, on a motion by Marx, the London District announced the dissolution of the League. ↩
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Source: Karl Marx: The Civil War in France (April-May 1871) ↩ ↩
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Editor's Note: After the assassination of Aleksandr the Second on the 1st of March, 1881 by the Populist organization People's Will, Aleksandr the Third was staying in Gatcina (the Russian tsars' countryside residence), fearing that new terrorist attacks would be staged by the Executive Committee of the People's Will. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1890 German Edition: I wrote in the Preface to the 1888 English Edition: «This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed toward it is best shown by my The Condition of the Working Class in England. But, when I again met Marx at Brussels in the spring of 1845, he had it ready worked out, and put it in front of me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.» ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1888 English Edition: Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto. But, in his public agitation in 1862-64, he did not go beyond demanding cooperative workshops supported by State credit. ↩
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Editor's Note: Comrade Engels made a mistake in naming V.I. Zasulic as the author of the translation; it was the work of G.V. Plehanov. ↩
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Editor's Note: The Owenites were the followers of Robert Owen, the English Utopian Socialist, whose ideas gained particularly wide currency in the 1820s and '30s. According to his system for transforming human life, the «communities» established on voluntary principles were to become a model for the development of the new productive forces (including the science of chemistry), the education of a new harmoniously developed human being, and the establishment of new social relations. His most prominent followers were John Grey, Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson, and John Bray. Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England: «English Socialism arose with Owen.» The Fourierites were the followers of Charles Fourier, the French Utopian Socialist, whose doctrine became especially widespread in the 1840s and '40s. Advocating the establishment of a harmonious social system on the basis of the ideas of the 18th-century materialists, Fourier admitted the presence in it of private property, classes, and unearned incomes. He believed that the main condition for the success of the new society was the growth of labour productivity that would secure universal wealth. Fourier's doctrine made a major impact on the social and philosophical thought in a number of countries in Europe and North America. ↩
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Source: Karl Marx: Provisional Rules of the International Workers' Association (21st to 27th of October, 1864) ↩ ↩
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Editor's Note: The Cologne Communist Trial (4th of October to 12th of November, 1852) was a trial of a group of Communist League members charged with «treasonable conspiracy». The trial was rigged by the Prussian police on the basis of forged documents and fabricated evidence, which were used, not only against the accused, but also to discredit the whole proletarian organization. The evidence included, for instance, the so-called Original Book of Minutes of the Central Authority of the Communist League and other documents forged by police agents, and also genuine documents of the Willich-Schapper «Left»-opportunist line, which was responsible for the split in the Communist League. Seven of the defendants were sentenced to terms of imprisonment of three to six years. Marx guided the defence from London by sending materials exposing the provocative methods of the prosecution; after the trial, he showed up its organizers for what they really were in his pamphlet, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. At the trial and in the prosecution's summary, the Manifesto of the Communist Party figured as evidence against the defendants. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1890 German Edition: Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a «disciple» of Marx, and, as such, stood, of course, on the ground of the Manifesto. Matters were quite different with regard to those of his followers who did not go beyond his demand for producers' cooperatives supported by State credits and who divided the whole working class into supporters of State assistance and supporters of self-assistance. ↩
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Editor's Note: The First World Congress of the Workers' First International was held at Geneva, Switzerland on the 3rd to 8th of September, 1866. Taking part in it were 60 delegates from the General Council and sections and workers' societies from Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland. The Congress was chaired by Hermann Jung. The official report of the General Council was Comrade Marx's The Different Questions. The Proudhonites, who had 1/3 of the votes, set against the report their own programme covering all items on the agenda. However, the supporters of the General Council outvoted them on most issues. Six out of nine points in the report (on the international combination of effort, on limitation of the workday to eight hours, on children's and women's labour, on cooperative labour, on trade unions, and on standing armies) were approved as resolutions of the Congress. The Congress also endorsed the General Rules and Administrative Regulations of the International Workers' Association. The First World Congress of the Socialist Second International was held at Paris, France on the 14th to 20th of July, 1889. It was originally convened as the International Socialist Workers' Congress. Preparations for the Congress had been made against the background of persistent struggles between the Marxists, led by Comrade Engels, and the French opportunists (the Possibilists) together with their followers in the British Social-Democratic Federation, who tried to take over the preparations for the Congress. However, it became evident at the Congress that the Marxist political parties were in the majority. The Congress opened on the 14th of July, 1889, the centenary of the beginning of the Great French Revolution with the storming of the Bastille. It was attended by 393 delegates representing nearly all the Socialist and workers' political parties and organizations of the time from 20 European and American countries. The Possibilists convened their own, parallel congress, which opened in Paris on the same day. However, it had very little success, and the reformists eventually had to give up the idea of establishing an international association — as a result, they joined the Marxist political parties. Not to openly oppose this merger was one of the major mistakes of Comrade Engels, which, among other things, led to the emergence of Social-Democratic revisionism in the Second International. The First World Congress of the Socialist Second International pointed out that the emancipation of labour could be attained only by the proletariat conquering political power with a view to expropriating the capitalists and socializing the means of production. The Congress heard reports from representatives of the Socialist Parties on the working-class movement in their countries and worked out the foundations of international labour law, calling for the eight-hour workday and a number of other improvements in industrial working conditions through international legislation. The Congress advocated the disbandment of standing armies and the general armament of the people. It passed a decision to mark the 1st of May, 1890 in all countries by demonstrations and meetings in defence of the demand for the eight-hour workday and other demands put forward by the Congress for labour legislation. ↩
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Editor's Note: This refers to the part of Poland which, under the official name of the Kingdom of Poland, passed over to Russia by decision of the Vienna Congress of 1814-15. ↩
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Editor's Note: This refers to the campaign waged by M.N. Katkov, editor of the reactionary Russian newspaper Moskovskie Vedomosti [Moscow News] for the introduction of protective tariffs on the commodities produced in the Kingdom of Poland. ↩
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See: Karl Marx: Erfurtery in the Year 1859 (Around the 9th of July, 1859), in which he states: «Reaction carries out the programme of the revolution. On this apparent contradiction rests the strength of Bonaparteism, which still today considers itself the mandatory of the Revolution of 1789; the success of the Schwarzenberg policy in Austria, which brought the vague 1848 dream of unity into a clear, positive focus; and the phantom of parliamentary reform of the Confederation, which is now current in Little Germany owing to Prussian initiative [...]. In the hands of reaction, to be sure, this programme of the revolution turns into a satire on the relevant revolutionary efforts, and thus becomes a lethal weapon in the hands of an implacable enemy. Reaction fulfils the demands of the revolution just as Louis Bonaparte fulfils those of the Italian nationalist political party. What is tragicomic in this process is that the poor sinners that are to be hanged there on their own phrases and stupidities cry ‹Bravo!› at the top of their voice as the executioner puts the noose around their necks, and wildly applaud their own execution.» ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1888 English Edition: By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By proletariat is meant the class of modern wage-labourers, who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order to live. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1888 English and 1890 German Editions: That is, all written history. In 1847, the prehistory of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social basis from which all Germanic peoples started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive-communal society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true nature of the clan and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primitive communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1888 English Edition: Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of, a guild. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1888 English Edition: «Commune» was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the «Third Estate». Generally speaking, for the economic development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1890 German Edition: This was the name given to their urban communities by the townspeople of Italy and France after they had purchased or wrested their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. ↩
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Editor's Note: In their works of the 1840s and '50s, prior to Comrade Marx having worked out the theory of surplus-value, Comrades Marx and Engels used the terms «value of labour», «price of labour», and «sale of labour», which, as Engels noted in the Preface to the 1891 German Edition of Wage-Labour and Capital by Marx, «from the standpoint of the later works were inadequate and even wrong». After he had proved that the worker sells to the capitalist, not their labour, but their labour-power, Marx used more precise terms. In later works, Marx and Engels used the terms «value of labour-power», «price of labour-power», and «sale of labour power». ↩
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Editor's Note: The Ten Hours' Bill, the struggle for which was carried out for a number of years, was passed in 1847 in the atmosphere of sharp contradictions between the landed aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie caused by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. To avenge themselves on the industrial bourgeoisie, some of the Conservatives supported the Bill. A detailed description of the standpoint taken by various classes on the question of limiting the workday was given by Comrade Engels in his articles, The Ten Hours Question and The English Ten Hours' Bill. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1888 English Edition: Not the English Restoration of 1660-89, but the French Restoration of 1814-30. ↩
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Editor's Note: Some of the French Legitimists, advocates of the Bourbon Dynasty overthrown in 1830, who upheld the interests of the big hereditary landowners, resorted to social demagogy in their struggle against the financial and industrial bourgeoisie, passing themselves off as defenders of the working people. «Young England» was a group of Conservative writers and politicians, including Disraeli and Ferrand, who were close to the Conservative philanthropists and founded a separate group in the House of Commons in 1841. Voicing the discontent of the landed aristocracy at the growing economic and political power of the bourgeoisie, they criticized the capitalist system and supported halfhearted philanthropic measures for improving the conditions of the workers. «Young England» disintegrated as a political group in 1845 and ceased to exist as a literary circle in 1848. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1888 English Edition: This applies mainly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and Junkers have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters of more or less shady joint-stock companies. ↩
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Editor's Note: This refers to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, published just before the Great French Revolution (1788). ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1890 German Edition: The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to dabble further in Socialism. The main representative and classical type of this tendency is Mr. Karl Grün. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1888 English Edition: Phalansteres were socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his utopia and, later on, to his communist colony in the United States. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1890 German Edition: «Home Colonies» were what Owen called his communist model societies. Phalansteres was the name of the public palaces planned by Fourier. Icaria was the name given to the utopian land of fancy whose communist institutions Cabet portrayed. ↩
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Editor's Note: The Reformists were a political party grouped around the Paris newspaper La Réforme [Reform], which included the Radical opponents of the July Monarchy — Republicans, Democrats, and small-bourgeois Socialists. The leaders of the Reformists, also called «Social-Democrats», were Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, and others. ↩
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Editor's Note: This refers to the National Reform Association founded in 1845. In the second half of the 1840s, the Association agitated for land reform, proclaiming as its aim free allotment of a plot of 160 acres to every worker; it came out against slave-owning planters and land profiteers. It also put forward demands for a ten-hour workday, abolition of slavery and the standing army, and so on. Many German migrant handicraftspeople, including members of the League of the Just, took part in the movement headed by the National Reform Association. By 1846, the movement among the German workers began to subside. One of the reasons for this was the activity of Kriege's group, whose «True Socialism» diverted the German migrants from the struggle for democratic aims. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1888 English Edition: The political party then represented in parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc, and in the daily press by the Réforme [Reform]. The name of Social-Democracy signified, with these its inventors, a faction of the Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with Socialism. ↩
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Note by Engels to the 1890 German Edition: The political party in France which at that time called itself Social-Democratic was represented in political life by Ledru-Rollin and in literature by Louis Blanc; thus, it differed immeasurably from present-day German Social-Democracy. ↩
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Editor's Note: This refers to the national liberation uprising in the Republic of Cracow, which, by decision of the Congress of Vienna, was jointly controlled by Austria, Russia, and Prussia — who had partitioned Poland at the end of the 18th century. The conquest of political power in Cracow by the insurgents on the 22nd of February, 1846 and the establishment of the National Government of the Republic of Poland, which issued a manifesto abolishing feudal services, were part of the plan for a general uprising in Poland, whose main inspirers were the revolutionary democrats (Dembowski and others). In March, the Cracow Uprising, lacking active support in other parts of Poland, was crushed by the forces of Austria and Tsarist Russia; in November 1846, Austria, Prussia, and Russia signed a treaty incorporating the «Free City of Cracow» into the Austrian Empire. ↩