~~~~
Written: Late 1847
First Published:
February 1848Translated: From German by Samuel Moore (ed. by
Fredrick Engels) in 1888Offline version: Marx & Engels Internet
Archive (www.marxists.org), 2001~~~~~
A spectre is haunting Europe
-- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope
and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where
is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that
has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its
reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II.
It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies,
and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this
end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in
the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
==========================
Bourgeois
and Proletarians ==========================
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted,
now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary 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 distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each
other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first
elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian
and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities
generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry,
in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets.
The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of
labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon,
steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry;
the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern
bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has
given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted
on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion
the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of
revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class.
An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune[1]: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable
"third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal
or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general
-- the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself,
in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing
the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie,
wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder
the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked
self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous
enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into
exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom
-- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless,
direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has
converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere
money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of 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 expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations
of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form,
was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch
from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,
are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with
his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.
It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie
has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.
All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries,
whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous
raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but
in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring
for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,
we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual
production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness
become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments
of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication,
draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into
civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy
artillery, with which it 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 civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates
a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased
the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy
of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries
dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production,
and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few
hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with
separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government,
one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie,
during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture,
steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole
populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered
in the lap of social labor?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated
in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under
which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word,
the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so
many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free
competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the
bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of
exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer
who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past,
the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions
of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.
It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois
society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also
of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that,
in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put
back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply
of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization,
too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer
tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for
these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole
of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to
comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction
of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the
old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby
crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the
men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.
In proportion
as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed
-- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.
These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently
exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing
to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character,
and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most
monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted,
almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the
price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness
of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases,
in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of
the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern
Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.
Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed
under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of
the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over looker, and, above all, in the individual
bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more
hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes
developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive
social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age
and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash,
than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class -- the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen
and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for
the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because
their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes
of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie.
At first, the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the work of people of a factory, then by the operative
of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not
against the bourgeois condition of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported
wares that compete with their labor, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force
the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their
mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active
union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the
whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do
not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial
bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every
victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater
masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks
of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial
crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing,
makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more
and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions)
against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order
to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate
result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that
are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just
this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle
between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle
Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into a political party, is continually being
upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It
compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie
itself. Thus, the Ten-Hours Bill in England was carried.
Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in many ways the course of development of the
proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those
portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with
the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask
for help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its
own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the
bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated
into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with
fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the
ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section
of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just
as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie
goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the
level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all
the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class.
The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential
product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the
bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary,
but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are
revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present,
but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society,
may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far
more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is
without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations;
modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped
him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk
in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society
at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society,
except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.
They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances
of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement
is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat,
the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super incumbent strata of
official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle.
The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil
war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent
overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto,
every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But
in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence.
The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke
of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with
the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper,
and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit
any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law.
It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help
letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under
this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential
conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition
for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose
involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary
combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation
on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own
grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
===========================
Proletarians and Communists
===========================
In what relation do the Communists
stand to the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They
do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:
(1)
In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common
interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.
(2) In the various stages
of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere
represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class
parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the
great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate
general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat
into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or
discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical
movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of
communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in
historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois
property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating
products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this
sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the
fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant,
a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to
a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois
private property?
But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property
which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labor for fresh
exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides
of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective
product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members
of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is
converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed
into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage labor.
The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely
requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by means of his
labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation
of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves
no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation,
under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling
class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society, accumulated
labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.
In bourgeois
society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society,
capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly
so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying,
and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted
selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the communist abolition
of buying and selling, or the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property
is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence
in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary
condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of
being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into
capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class
owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism
deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate
the labor of others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will
overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those who
acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can no longer
be any wage labor when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same
way, been urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the bourgeois,
the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to
him identical with the disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your
bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois
production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will
whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason the social forms
stringing from your present mode of production and form of property -- historical relations that rise and disappear in the
progress of production -- this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly
in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the
case of your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely
developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical
absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish
as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the
intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the intervention
of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence
of the ruling class.
The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes
all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder,
and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.
But you
Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois
sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common,
and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments
of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which,
they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free
love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of
common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
Bourgeois
marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached
with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free
love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition
of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists
are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.
The working
men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political
supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national,
though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of
the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions
of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action of the leading civilized countries
at least is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion
as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will
also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation
to another will come to an end.
The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint,
are not deserving of serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man's consciousness,
changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as
material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express that fact that within the old society
the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution
of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian
ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary
bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition
within the domain of knowledge.
"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical, and juridicial ideas have been modified in the course
of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change."
"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But
communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis;
it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."
What does this accusation reduce
itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed
different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society
by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays,
moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of
class antagonisms.
The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved
the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism.
We have
seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling
class to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize
all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase
the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property,
and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and
untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social
order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
These
measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced
countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property
in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition
of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5.
Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6.
Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension
of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement
of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all
the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination
of education with industrial production, etc.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in
the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power,
properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest
with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution,
it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along
with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and
will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which
the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
==================================
Socialist and Communist Literature
==================================
1.
Reactionary Socialism
A. Feudal Socialism
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets
against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies
again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary
battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature, the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate
its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their
revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future;
at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous
in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
The aristocracy,
in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it
joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England" exhibited this spectacle.
In pointing
out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under
circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the
modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of
society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against
the bourgeois amounts to this: that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed which is destined to cut up, root
and branch, the old order of society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary
proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all corrective measures against the working class; and in ordinary life,
despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter
truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.[1]
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has clerical socialism with feudal socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private
property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in the place
of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian socialism
is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions
of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant
proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially
and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed,
fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual
members of this class, however, as being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as
Modern Industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section
of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers
who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois régime, the standard
of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for
the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also
in England.
This school of socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production.
It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and
division of labor; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable
ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities
in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of
the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
In it positive aims, however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of
exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and
of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means.
In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of socialism
ended in a miserable hangover.
C.
German or "True" Socialism
The socialist and communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie
in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the
bourgeoisie in that country had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.
German
philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (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 eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution
were nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French
bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure will, of will as it was bound to be, of true human will generally.
The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical
conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view.
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works
of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French literature. They
wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic
functions of money, they wrote "alienation of humanity", and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote
"dethronement of the category of the general", and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms, they dubbed "Philosophy
of Action", "True Socialism", "German Science of Socialism", "Philosophical Foundation of Socialism", and so on.
The French socialist and communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased, in the hands of
the German, to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome "French one-sidedness"
and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests
of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical
fantasy.
This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade
in such a mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight
of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words,
the liberal movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement with
the socialistic demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against
bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching
to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German socialism forgot,
in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society,
with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those
attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments,
with their following of parsons, professors, country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the
threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with which these same governments, just at that
time, dosed the German working-class risings.
While this "True" Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the
same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of German philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois
class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real
social basis of the existing state of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy
of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction -- on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other,
from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread
like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this
transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths", all skin and bone, served to wonderfully
increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part German socialism recognized, more and more, its own
calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois philistine.
It proclaimed
the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness
of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went
to the extreme length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of communism, and of proclaiming its supreme
and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called socialist and communist publications
that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.[1]2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of
bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class,
organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner
reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty as an example of this form.
The socialistic
bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom.
They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie
without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois
socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to
carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightaway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality that
the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning
the bourgeoisie.
A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary
movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions
of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence,
this form of socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition
that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations;
reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost,
and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government.
Bourgeois socialism attains
adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.
Free
trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison reform: for the
benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois -- for the benefit of the working class.3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism
We do
not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat,
such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal
society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the
absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by
the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat
had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
The socialist and communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and others, spring into
existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section
1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements
in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without
any historical initiative or any independent political movement.
Since the development of class
antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer
to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science,
after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to
fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organization of the proletariat to an organization of society especially
contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying
out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being
the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider
themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that
of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference,
to the ruling class. For how can people when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of
the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful
means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state
and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for
a general reconstruction of society.
But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing
society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures
proposed in them -- such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of
industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion
of the function of the state into a more superintendence of production -- all these proposals point solely to the disappearance
of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognized in
their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian character.
The significance of critical-utopian socialism and communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In
proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest,
these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justifications. Therefore, although the originators
of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects.
They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat.
They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They
still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated phalansteres, of establishing "Home
Colonies", or setting up a "Little Icaria" -- 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 depicted above, differing from these only
by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to
them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Réformistes.
===========================
Position
of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties===========================
Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class parties, such as the Chartists
in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the
working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France,
the Communists ally with the Social Democrats against the conservative and radical
bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally
handed down from the great Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic
elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation,
that party which fomented the insurrection of Krakow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with
the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty-bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working class the clearest possible recognition of
the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many
weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along
with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie
itself may immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution
that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization and with a much more developed proletariat
than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in
Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
In short,
the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter
what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by
the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians
have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKERS
OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
================================================
Appendix: Prefaces to various Language Editions
================================================
The
1872 German Edition
The Communist League, an international association of workers, which could of course be only a secret one, under conditions
obtaining at the time, commissioned us, the undersigned, at the Congress held in London in November 1847, to write for publication
a detailed theoretical and practical programme for the Party. Such was the origin of the following Manifesto, the manuscript
of which travelled to London to be printed a few weeks before the February Revolution. First published in German, it has been
republished in that language in at least twelve different editions in Germany, England, and America. It was published in English
for the first time in 1850 in the Red Republican, London, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and in 1871 in at least three
different translations in America. The French version first appeared in Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848,
and recently in Le Socialiste of New York. A new translation is in the course of preparation. A Polish version appeared in
London shortly after it was first published in Germany. A Russian translation was published in Geneva in the 'sixties. Into
Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its appearance.
However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down
in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical
application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the 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 today. In view of the gigantic
strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in
view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where
the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated.
One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery,
and wield it for its own purposes." (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working
Men'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. A subsequent edition may perhaps
appear with an introduction bridging the gap from 1847 to the present day; but this reprint was too unexpected to leave us
time for that.
Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels
London,
June 24, 1872
The 1882 Russian Edition
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was published early in the
'sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) only
a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last
section: the position of the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various countries. Precisely Russia
and the United States are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction,
when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe
with raw materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products. Both were, therefore, in one
way of another, pillars of the existing European system.
How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North American for a gigantic agricultural production,
whose competition is shaking the very foundations of European landed property -- large and small. At the same time, it enabled
the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the
industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary
manner upon America itself. Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political
constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous
concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the industrial regions.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well,
found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed
the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia forms the vanguard
of revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois
property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning
to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though
greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common
ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical
evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution
in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point
for a communist development.
Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels
January
21, 1882, London
The 1883 German Edition
The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole working class class of
Europe and America owes more than to any one else -- rests at Highgate Cemetary and over his grave the first grass is already
growing. Since his death [March 13, 1883], there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But
I consider it all the more necessary again to state the following expressly:
The basic
thought running through the Manifesto -- that economic production, and the structure of society of every historical epoch
necessarily arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently
(ever since the dissolution of the primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles,
of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution;
that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer
emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing
the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles -- this basic thought belongs soley and exclusively to
Marx.[1]
I have already stated this
many times; but precisely now is it necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.
Fredrick
EngelsJune 28, 1883, London
The
1888 English Edition
The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working men'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 November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare 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 24. A French translation was brought out in Paris shortly before the insurrection
of June 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney's Red Republican,
London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been published.
The defeat of the Parisian
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 selebrated "Cologne Communist Trial" lasted from October 4 till
November 12; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years.
Immediately after the sentence, the League was formlly dissolved by the remaining members. As to the Manifesto, it seemed
henceforth doomed to oblivion.
When the European workers 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 trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France,
Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans in Germany.[1]
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
in 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 favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions
for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different
men from what it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative
English trade unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with the International, were gradually advancing
towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their president could say in their name: "Continental socialism has lost
its terror for us." In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of all countries.
The Manifesto itself came thus 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 Woorhull and Claflin's Weekly. From this English version, a French one was made 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. 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, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted; there have been twelve altogether at
the least. 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 had not seen. Thus the history
of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide spread,
the most international production of all socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men
from Siberia to California.
Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood,
on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists 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 manner 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 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 enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet
in France, and of Weitling 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 workers 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
the nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production
and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which it is built up, and from
that 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
forms 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 distinction, 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 Conditions of the Working Class in England. 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 the following:
"However
much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto
are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the
principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the 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 today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern
Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical
experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for
the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially
was proved by the Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it
for its own purposes." (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Assocation
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.
Fredrick
EngelsJanuary 30, 1888, London
The
1890 German Edition
Since [The 1883 German edition preface] was written, a new German edition of the Manifesto has again become necessary,
and much has also happened to the Manifesto which should be recorded here.
A second
Russian translation -- by Vera Zasulich -- appeared in Geneva in 1882; the preface to that edition was written by Marx and
myself. Unfortunately, the original German manuscript has gone astray; I must therefore retranslate from the Russian which
will in no way improve the text. It reads:
[ Reprint of the 1882 Russian Edition ]
At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: Manifest Kommunistyczny.
Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885. Unfortunately,
it is not quite complete; certain essential passages, which seem to have presented difficulties to the translator, have been
omitted, and, in addition, there are signs of carelessness here and there, which are all the more unpleasantly conspicuous
since the translation indicates that had the translator taken a little more pains, he would have done an excellent piece of
work.
A new French version appeared in 1886, in Le Socialiste of Paris; it is the best published to date.
From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in El Socialista of Madrid, and then reissued in pamphlet
form: Manifesto del Partido Communista por Carlos Marx y F. Engels, Madrid, Administracion de El Socialista, Hernan Cortes.
As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the manuscript of an Armenian translation was offered to a publisher
in Constantinople. But the good man did not have the courage to publish something bearing the name of Marx and suggested that
the translator set down his own name as author, which the latter however declined.
After
one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate American translations had been repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic
version at last appeared in 1888. This was my friend Samuel Moore, and we went through it together once more before it went
to press. It is entitled: Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorized English translation,
edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet Street, E.C. I have added some of the notes
of that edition to the present one.
The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with enthusiasm, at the time of its appearance, by the not at all
numerous vanguard of scientific socialism (as is proved by the translations mentioned in the first place), it was soon forced
into the background by the reaction that began with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally excommunicated
"by law" in the conviction of the Cologne Communists in November 1852. With the disappearance from the public scene of the
workers' movement that had begun with the February Revolution, the Manifesto too passed into the background.
When the European workers had again gathered sufficient strength for a new onslaught upon the power of the ruling classes,
the International Working Men's Association came into being. Its aim was to weld together into one huge army the whole militant
working class of Europe and America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles laid down in the Manifesto. It was
bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on the English trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish
Proudhonists, and the German Lassalleans. This programme --the considerations underlying the Statutes of the International
-- was drawn up by Marx with a master hand acknowledged even by the Bakunin and the anarchists. For the ultimate final triumph
of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon the intellectual development of the working class, as it
necessarily has to ensue from united action and discussion. The events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the
defeats even more than the successes, could not but demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy of their former universal panaceas,
and make their minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And
Marx was right. The working class of 1874, at the dissolution of the International, was altogether different from that of
1864, at its foundation. Proudhonism in the Latin countries, and the specific Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out; and
even the ten arch-conservative English trade unions were gradually approaching the point where, in 1887, the chairman of their
Swansea Congress could say in their name: "Continental socialism has lost its terror for us." Yet by 1887 continental socialism
was almost exclusively the theory heralded in the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent, the history of the Manifesto reflects
the history of the modern working-class movement since 1848. At present, it is doubtless the most widely circulated, the most
international product of all socialist literature, the common programme of many millions of workers of all countries from
Siberia to California.
Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were
considered socialists. On the one hand were the adherents of the various utopian systems, notably the Owenites in England
and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out. On the
other, the manifold types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social abuses through their various universal panaceas
and all kinds of patch-work, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, people who stood outside the
labor movement and who looked for support rather to the "educated" classes. The section of the working class, however, which
demanded a radical reconstruction of society, convinced that mere political revolutions were not enough, then called itself
Communist. It was still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude communism. Yet, it was powerful enough
to bring into being two systems of utopian communism -- in France, the "Icarian" communists of Cabet, and in Germany that
of Weitling. Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent
at least, quite respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And since we were very decidely of the opinion as early
as then that "the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the working class itself," we could have no hesitation as
to which of the two names we should choose. Nor has it ever occured to us to repudiate it.
"Working
men of all countries, unite!" But few voices responded when we proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve
of the first Paris Revolution in which the proletariat came out with the demands of its own. On September 28, 1864, however,
the proletarians of most of the Western European countries joined hands in the International Working Men's Association of
glorious memory. True, the International itself lived only nine years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all
countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today,
as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time,
mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal
enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers' Congress of
1889. And today's spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the
proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!
Fredrick Engels
May 1, 1890, London
The 1892 Polish Edition
The fact that a new Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto has become necessary gives rise to various thoughts.
First of all, it is noteworthy that of late the Manifesto has become an index, as it were, of the development of large-scale
industry on the European continent. In proportion as large-scale industry expands in a given country, the demand grows among
the workers of that country for enlightenment regarding their position as the working class in relation to the possessing
classes, the socialist movement spreads among them and the demand for the Manifesto increases. Thus, not only the state of
the labour movement but also the degree of development of large-scale industry can be measured with fair accuracy in every
country by the number of copies of the Manifesto circulated in the language of that country.
Accordingly, the new Polish edition indicates a decided progress of Polish industry. And there can be no doubt whatever
that this progress since the previous edition published ten years ago has actually taken place. Russian Poland, Congress Poland,
has become the big industrial region of the Russian Empire. Whereas Russian large-scale industry is scattered sporadically
– a part round the Gulf of Finland, another in the center (Moscow and Vladimir), a third along the coasts of the Black
and Azov seas, and still others elsewhere – Polish industry has been packed into a relatively small area and enjoys
both the advantages and disadvantages arising from such concentration. The competing Russian manufacturers acknowledged the
advantages when they demanded protective tariffs against Poland, in spit of their ardent desire to transform the Poles into
Russians. The disadvantages – for the Polish manufacturers and the Russian government – are manifest in the rapid
spread of socialist ideas among the Polish workers and in the growing demand for the Manifesto.
But the rapid development of Polish industry, outstripping that of Russia, is in its turn a new proof of the inexhaustible
vitality of the Polish people and a new guarantee of its impending national restoration. And the restoration of an independent
and strong Poland is a matter which concerns not only the Poles but all of us. A sincere international collaboration of the
European nations is possible only if each of these nations is fully autonomous in its own house. The Revolution of 1848, which
under the banner of the proletariat, after all, merely let the proletarian fighters do the work of the bourgeoisie, also secured
the independence of Italy, Germany and Hungary through its testamentary executors, Louis Bonaparte and Bismarck; but Poland,
which since 1792 had done more for the Revolution than all these three together, was left to its own resources when it succumbed
in 1863 to a tenfold greater Russian force. The nobility could neither maintain nor regain Polish independence; today, to
the bourgeoisie, this independence is, to say the last, immaterial. Nevertheless, it is a necessity for the harmonious collaboration
of the European nations. It can be gained only by the young Polish proletariat, and in its hands it is secure. For the workers
of all the rest of Europe need the independence of Poland just as much as the Polish workers themselves.
F.
EngelsLondon, February 10, 1892
The
1893 Italian Edition
Publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party coincided, one may say, with March 18, 1848, the day of the revolution
in Milan and Berlin, which were armed uprisings of the two nations situated in the center, the one, of the continent of Europe,
the other, of the Mediterranean; two nations until then enfeebled by division and internal strife, and thus fallen under foreign
domination. While Italy was subject to the Emperor of Austria, Germany underwent the yoke, not less effective though more
indirect, of the Tsar of all the Russias. The consequences of March 18, 1848, freed both Italy and Germany from this disgrace;
if from 1848 to 1871 these two great nations were reconstituted and somehow again
put on their own, it was as Karl Marx used to say, because the men who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were, nevertheless,
its testamentary executors in spite of themselves.
Everywhere that revolution was the work of the working class; it was the latter that built the barricades and paid
with its lifeblood. Only the Paris workers, in overthrowing the government, had the very definite intention of overthrowing
the bourgeois regime. But conscious though they were of the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie,
still, neither the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the mass of French workers had as
yet reached the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In the final analysis, therefore, the fruits
of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class. In the other countries, in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, the workers,
from the very outset, did nothing but raise the bourgeoisie to power. But in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible
without national independence Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the unity and autonomy of the nations
that had lacked them up to then: Italy, Germany, Hungary. Poland will follow in turn.
Thus,
if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved the way, prepared the ground for the latter. Through the
impetus given to large-scaled industry in all countries, the bourgeois regime during the last forty-five years has everywhere
created a numerous, concentrated and powerful proletariat. It has thus raised, to use the language of the Manifesto, its own
grave-diggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to achieve the international union
of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of these nations toward common aims. Just imagine joint international
action by the Italian, Hungarian, German, Polish and Russian workers under the political conditions preceding 1848!
The battles fought in 1848 were thus not fought in vain. Nor have the forty-five years separating us from that revolutionary
epoch passed to no purpose. The fruits are ripening, and all I wish is that the publication of this Italian translation may
augur as well for the victory of the Italian proletariat as the publication of the original did for the international revolution.
The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism in the past. The first capitalist nation
was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal figured:
an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical
era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?
Fredrick
EngelsLondon, February 1, 1893
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social
production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production
of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of
society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen
(1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer 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 organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare,
in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation
to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally
antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthumus und
des Staats, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]
Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head
of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]
This was the name given their urban
communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government
from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition]
"Commune" was the name taken in
France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political
rights as the "Third Estate". Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken
as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888 English Edition] Not the English Restoration (1660-1689),
but the French Restoration (1814-1830). [Engels, 1888 German edition] 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 aristocracy are, as yet, rather above
that; but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock
companies. [Engels, 1888 German edition] The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the
desire to dabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical type of this tendency is Mr. Karl Gruen. [Engels, 1888
German edition]
Phalanstéres 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. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]
"Home Colonies" were what Owen called his Communist model societies. Phalanstéres
was the anem of the public palaces planned by Fourier. Icaria was the name given to the Utopian land of fancy, whose Communist
instituions Cabet portrayed. [Engels, 1890 German Edition] The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc,
in the daily press by the Reforme. The name of Social-Democracy signifies, with these its inventors, a section of the Democratic
or Republican Party more or less tinged with socialism. [Engels, English Edition 1888] "This proposition", I wrote in the preface to
the English translation, "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 Conditions of the Working Class in England. 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."] Lassalle personally, to us, always
acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto. But in his first public
agitation, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond demanding co-operative workshops supported by state credit.
Manifesto
of the Communist PartyKarl Marx and Frederick Engels
Marxists
Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000Transcription and markup:
Zodiac and Brian Basgen
