MANIFESTO

OF THE

COMMUNIST PARTY

BY

KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS

AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION

EDITED AND ANNOTATED BY FRIEDRICH ENGELS

INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK

# PREFACE

By FRIEDRICH ENGELS

The *Manifesto* was published as the platform of the Communist League, a workingmen's association, first exclusively German, later on international, and, under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a 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 February 24th.¹ A French translation was brought out in Paris, shortly before the insurrection of June, 1848.² 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 insurrection of June, 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. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was again, as it had been before the revolution of February, solely between different sections 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 middle-class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested, and, after eighteen months' imprisonment, they were tried in October, 1852. This celebrated "Cologne Communist Trial" lasted from October 4th till November 12th; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment.

[ 3 ]

ment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately
after the sentence, the League was formally dissolved by the remain-
ing members. As to the *Manifesto*, it seemed thenceforth to be
doomed to oblivion.

When the European working class had recovered sufficient strength
for another attack on the ruling classes, the International Working-
men's Association sprang up. But this association, formed with the
express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat
of Europe and 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 trades
unions, to the followers of Proudhon ³ in France, Belgium, Italy, and
Spain, and to the Lassalleans ⁴ 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
men'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 men from what it had found them in 1864. Proudhonism
in France, Lassalleanism in Germany were dying out, and even the
conservative English trades unions, though most of them had long
since severed their connection with the International, were gradually
advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their
president 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 workingmen of all countries.

The *Manifesto* itself thus came to the front again. Since 1850
the German text had been reprinted several times in Switzerland,
England and America. In 1872, it was translated into English in
New York, where the translation was published in *Woodhull and
Claflin's Weekly*. From this English version, a French one was made

[4]

in *Le Socialiste* of New York. Since then at least two more English translations, more or less mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin, was published at Herzen's *Kolokol* office in Geneva; about 1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulich, also in Geneva, in 1882.⁵ A new Danish edition is to be found in *Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek*, Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation in *Le Socialiste*, Paris, 1886. From this latter, a Spanish version was prepared and published in Madrid, in 1886. Not counting the German reprints there had been at least twelve editions. An Armenian translation, which was to be published in Constantinople 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 his own production. Of further translations into other languages I have heard, but have not seen. 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 workingmen 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 ⁶ in England, Fourierists ⁷ in France, 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 men 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, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful

[ 5 ]

enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian Communism of Cabet ⁸ in France, and of Weitling ⁹ in Germany. Thus, in 1847, Socialism was a middle class 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," there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. 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 organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles form a series of evolutions 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 towards it, is best shown by my *Condition of the Working Class in England*.¹⁰ But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring, 1845, he had it already worked out, and put it before me, in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.

From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote:

[ 6 ]

"However much the state of things may have altered during the last 25 years, the general principles laid down in this *Manifesto* are, on the whole, as correct to-day 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 historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded to-day. In view of the gigantic strides of modern industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organisation 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, viz., that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.' (See *The Civil War in France; Address by the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association, 1871*, where this point is further developed.) 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 IV), although in principle still correct, yet 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.

London, January 30th, 1888.

[7]

By KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals ¹¹ and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

[ 8 ]

I

BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS ¹²

The history of all hitherto existing society ¹³ is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster ¹⁴ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: It has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—bourgeoisie and proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers ¹⁵ of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened

[ 9 ]

up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds,¹⁶ now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, modern industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires—the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, it became an armed and self-governing association in the mediæval commune;¹⁷ here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there

[ 10 ]

taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); after-
wards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the
semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against
the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in
general—the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of
modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself,
in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The
executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing
the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary rôle in history.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an
end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly
torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural
superiors," and has left no other bond between man and man than
naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned
the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous en-
thusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of ego-
tistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange
value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered free-
doms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.
In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political
illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal ex-
ploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto
honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted
the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science,
into its paid wage-labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental
veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal
display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much
admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence.
It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about.
It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids,
Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expe-

[ 11 ]

ditions that put in the shade all former migrations of nations and crusades.

The bourgoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish 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 civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigent raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal

[ 12 ]

inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations, even the most barbarian, into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

More and more the bourgeoisie keeps doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier and one customs tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than

[ 13 ]

have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

We see then that the means of production and of exchange, which served as the foundation for the growth of the bourgeoisie, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in a word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all

[ 14 ]

earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and no sooner do they overcome these fetters than they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves 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 division of

[ 15 ]

labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more em-bittering 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. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner has the labourer received his wages in cash, for the moment escaping exploitation by the manufacturer, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shop-keeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

[ 16 ]

The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen ³¹ generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the work people of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash machinery to pieces, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover still able to do so for a time. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all

[ 17 ]

distinctions of labour and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the
same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and
the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever
more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever
more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more
precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and indi-
vidual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions
between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combi-
nations (trade unions) against the bourgeoisie; they club together
in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent asso-
ciations 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 furthered
by the improved means of communication which are created by
modern industry, and which place the workers of different localities
in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was
needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same
character, into one national struggle between classes. But every
class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain
which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable high-
ways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways,
achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently
into a political party, is continually being upset again by the com-
petition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again,
stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of
particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the
divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hour bill ¹⁸ in
England was carried.

Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further
the course of development of the proletariat in many ways. The
bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with
the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself

[ 18 ]

whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry;
at all times with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these
battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for
its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bour-
goisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements
of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the
proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling
classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the prole-
tariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence.
These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlighten-
ment 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 old society, assumes such a violent, glaring
character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift,
and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in
its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the
nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bour-
geoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of
the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie
today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other
classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry;
the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper,
the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save
from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They
are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they
are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If
by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their
impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their
present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint
to adopt that of the proletariat.

[ 19 ]

The "dangerous class," the social scum (Lumpenproletariat), that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

The social conditions of the old society no longer exist for the
proletariat. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his
wife and children has no longer anything in common with
bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjec-
tion to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in
Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character.
Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices,
behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to
fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large
to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot be-
come masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolish-
ing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every
other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their
own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous
securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities,
or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the
self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in
the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest
stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up,
without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being
sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the prole-
tariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The
proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters
with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the
proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within
existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into

[ 20 ]

open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie
lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already
seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in
order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it
under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf,
in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the com-
mune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal abso-
lutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer,
on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks
deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class.
He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than
population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the
bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and
to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding
law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an
existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting
him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being
fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in
other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence and sway of the bour-
geois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condi-
tion 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 bour-
geoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie
therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall
and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

[ 21 ]

II
PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as
a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other
working class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the
proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which
to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working class
parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians
of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front
the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all
nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the
struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass
through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the
movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the
most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of
every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the
other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the
proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march,
the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian
movement.

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

[ 22 ]

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

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

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

[ 23 ]

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social, power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

Let us now take wage-labour.

The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only insofar as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

[ 24 ]

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of
production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying dis-
appears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the
other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general,
have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and
buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no
meaning when opposed to the Communist abolition of buying and
selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bour-
geoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private prop-
erty. But in your existing society, private property is already done
away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few
is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.
You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form
of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-
existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In 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 monopo-
lised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer
be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that mo-
ment, you say, individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no
other person than the bourgeois, than the middle class owner of
property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and
made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the
products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to
subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.

It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property
all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone
to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who

[ 25 ]

work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can no longer be any wage-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 culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

[ 26 ]

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention of society, direct or indirect, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.

[ 27 ]

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be re-proached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident, that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life, corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

[ 28 ]

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production
is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas
of its ruling class.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but
express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new
one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps
even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in
the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death-
battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of re-
ligious liberty and freedom of conscience, merely gave expression to
the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religion, moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change."

"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to
all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the
other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages,
despite all the mutiplicity and variety it displays, moves within cer-
tain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely van-
ish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with tradi-
tional property relations; no wonder that its development involves
the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

[ 29 ]

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

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

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

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries;

[ 30 ]

gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by
a more equable distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of child factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

[ 31 ]

III

SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE

1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM

a. Feudal Socialism

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July, 1830,¹⁹ and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succeeded to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period ²⁰ had become impossible.

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took its revenge by singing lamPOONS against its new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose Feudal Socialism: Half lamentation, half lamPOON; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effect through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, as often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

[ 32 ]

One section of the French Legitimists,²¹ and "Young England,"²² exhibited this spectacle.

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different from that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different, and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism, that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat, as that it creates a *revolutionary* proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.²³

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

## b. Petty Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society.

[ 33 ]

The mediæval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie.

In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.

In countries, like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi²⁴ was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England.

This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.

In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping

[ 34 ]

the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and utopian.

Its last words are: Corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture.

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues.

### c. German or "True" Socialism

The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and men of letters eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the 18th century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes the laws of pure will, of will as it was bound to be, of true human will generally.

The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view.

This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely by translation.

[ 35 ]

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote "alienation of humanity," and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state, they wrote, "dethronement of the category of the general," and so forth.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of Action," "True Socialism," "German Science of Socialism," "Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and so on.

The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical phantasy.

This German Socialism, which took its school-boy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.

The fight of the German and especially of the Prussianbourgeoisie against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest.

By this, the long-wished-for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French

[ 36 ]

criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of
modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic condi-
tions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto,
the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending
struggle in Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons,
professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scare-
crow 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
risings of the German working class.

While this "True" Socialism thus served the governments as a
weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time,
directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German
Philistines. In Germany the petty bourgeois class, a relic of the
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 supremacy of the bour-
geoisie threatens it with certain destruction—on the one hand, from
the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revo-
lutionary 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 increase wonderfully the sale
of their goods amongst such a public.

And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more,
its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty bourgeois
Philistine.

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the
German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous
meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic
interpretation, the exact contrary of his real character. It went to

[ 37 ]

the extreme length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.

## 2. CONSERVATIVE OR BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhon's *Philosophy of Poverty* as an example of this form.

The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in eco-

[ 38 ]

nomic relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: For the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: For the benefit of the working class. Prison reform: For the benefit of the working class. These are the last words and the only seriously meant words of bourgeois Socialism.

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois are bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class.

### 3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf ²⁵ and others.

The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends—made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown—necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.

The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of St. Simon,²⁶ Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between

[ 39 ]

proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as such Socialists find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to phantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat to an organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history, resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.

In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.

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Such phantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a phantastic 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 writings contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them—such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country; abolition of the family, of private gain and of the wage-system; the proclamation of social harmony; the conversion of the functions of the state into a mere superintendence of production—all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their earliest, indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian character.

The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this phantastic standing apart from the contest, these phantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social utopias, of founding isolated phalanstères, of establishing "Home Colonies," or setting up a "Little Icaria"²⁷—pocket editions of the New Jerusalem—and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists

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depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic
pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the
miraculous effects of their social science.

They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part
of the working class; such action, according to them, can only
result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.

The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respec-
tively, oppose the Chartists ²⁸ and the Réformistes.

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IV

POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE
VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES

Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the
existing working class parties, such as the Chartists in England and
the Agrarian Reformers in America.²⁹

The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims,
for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class;
but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care
of the future of that movement. In France the Communists ally
themselves with the Social-Democrats,³⁰ against the conservative
and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a
critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally
handed down from the great Revolution.

In Switzerland they support the Radicals, without losing sight of
the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of
Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bour-
geois.

In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian revo-
lution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party
which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.

In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a
revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squire-
archy, and the petty bourgeoisie.³²

But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the
working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antago-
nism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German
workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bour-
geoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must

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necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that,
after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against
the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than what existed in England in the 17th and in France in the 18th century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary
movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading
question in each case, the property question, no matter what its
degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of
the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They
openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible
overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes
tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing
to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workingmen of all countries, unite!

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NOTES

(All unsigned notes are those made by Engels to the English edition of
1888; all others were prepared by the editor and are so marked. Where it
was found necessary to enlarge upon Engels' notes, the additions appear in
brackets.)

1. King Louis Philippe was deposed and a republic proclaimed as result of the revolution in Paris, February 22-24, 1848.—Ed.

2. The rising of the Parisian workers, June 23-27, 1848. The insurrection was suppressed by General Cavaignac with great slaughter.—Ed.

3. Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865).—French publicist and political economist; leading exponent of petty-bourgeois Socialism.—Ed.

4. Lassalle [Ferdinand Lassalle, 1825-1864] always acknowledged himself to us personally to be a disciple of Marx and, as such, stood on the ground of the *Manifesto*. But in his public agitation, 1862-64, he did not go beyond demanding co-operative workshops supported by state credit.

5. The Russian version published at Geneva in 1882 was made by Plekhanov, not by Vera Zasulich. Bakunin's translation appeared in 1870.—Ed.

6. The followers of Robert Owen (1771-1858), leading English utopian Socialist. He envisioned a collective economic and social life organised in small communist communes, where property would be owned in common.—Ed.

7. The followers of Francois Charles Fourier (1772-1837), leading French utopian Socialist, who urged a system of colonies on a socialist plan. His criticism of bourgeois society was recognised as basic both by Marx and Engels.—Ed.

8. Etienne Cabet (1788-1856).—A French utopian, exiled to England for his participation in the July Revolution of 1830. In his book, *Voyage en Icarie*, he pictures life in a Communist society.—Ed.

9. Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871).—A German utopian Socialist who took part in the revolutionary movement of 1848 and exerted great influence among the German workers. He came to America where he carried on socialist agitation among German workers.—Ed.

10. *The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844*, by Friedrich Engels, translated by Florence K. Wischnewetsky, who later assumed her

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maiden name of Florence Kelley and was a well-known social worker in America.—Ed.

11. Metternich (1773-1859).—Chancellor of the Austrian empire and acknowledged leader of the European reaction. Guizot (1787-1874) was the French intellectual protagonist of high finance and of the industrial bourgeoisie and the irreconcilable foe of the proletariat. The French Radicals, Marrast (1802-1852), Carnot (1801-1888), and Marie (1795-1870) waged polemic warfare against the Socialists and Communists.—Ed.

12. By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour; by proletariat, 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.

13. That is, all written history. In 1837, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then Haxthausen [August von, 1792-1866] discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer [Georg Ludwig von] proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races 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 organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's [Lewis H., 1818-1881] crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primæval 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*.

14. Guild-master, that is a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild.

15. Chartered burghers were freemen who had been admitted to the privileges of a chartered borough thus possessing full political rights.—Ed.

16. Craft guilds, made up of exclusive and privileged groups of artisans were, during the feudal period, granted monopoly rights to markets by municipal authorities. The guilds imposed minute regulations on their members controlling such matters as working hours, wages, prices, tools and the hiring of workers.—Ed.

17. "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.

18. The 10-Hour Bill, for which the English workers had been fighting for 30 years, was made a law in 1847.—Ed.

19. In July, 1830, the Parisians rose in revolt against Charles X. The elder

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branch of the Bourbon family was driven out, and Louis Philippe, of the younger or Orleans branch, became "King of the French."—Ed.

20. Not the English Restoration, 1660 to 1689, but the French Restoration, 1814 to 1830.

21. The French legitimists favoured the claims of the elder branch of the Bourbon family, as against the Orleanists, the younger branch.—Ed.

22. "Young England" included a group of philanthropic tories and youthful sprigs of the British and Irish aristocracy, who strongly opposed industrial capitalism and wished to restore feudalism.—Ed.

23. This applies chiefly to Germany where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy 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 aristocrats 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.

24. Jean Charles Leonard (Simonde) Sismondi (1773-1842).—French historian and economist.—Ed.

25. Francois Noel Babeuf (1764-1797).—A radical republican (Jacobin) in the Great French Revolution who was guillotined for plotting a revolution aiming at the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the creation of a Communist state.—Ed.

26. Claude Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon (1760-1825).—French utopian Socialist who saw the labour question as the prime social question of the future and proposed as a solution the organisation of production by "association."—Ed.

27. Phalanstères were socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his Utopia and, later on, to his American Communist colony.

28. Chartism lasted as a more or less organised radical political movement of the British workers from 1837 to 1848. The People's Charter, for which the Chartists fought, demanded an immediate improvement in the workers' conditions as well as legislative reforms.—Ed.

29. Reference is made to the leaders of "Young America" who, during the struggle of the New York farmers against high rents, demanded the nationalisation of the land and limitation of farms to 160 acres. After a few paltry reforms had been obtained in the field of agrarian legislation, the movement petered out.—Ed.

30. The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc [1811-1882], in the daily press by the Réforme. The name of Social-Democracy signifies, with these its inventors, a section of the Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with Socialism.

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31. *Rentier* in the German original. This signifies a property owner (in this case a small property owner), living on the income of his capital invested in securities, such as domestic and foreign government bonds, or industrial shares.—*Ed.*

32. *Kleinbürgereit* in the German original. Marx and Engels used this term to describe the reactionary elements of the urban petty bourgeoisie who supported the rule of the feudal nobility and the absolute monarchy. The ideal of these elements was the guild system of the Middle Ages. In Germany this section of the population was very numerous in most of the cities and towns.—*Ed.*

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