Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism.
All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals 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.
-CHAPTER I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing societies 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 re-
constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement
of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank.
In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle
Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost
all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society
has not done away with class antagonisms.
It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of
struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive
feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps,
into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers 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, under which industrial production was monopolised by
closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets.
The manufacturing system took its place.
The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division
of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of
labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising.
Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionised industrial production.
The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the
industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole
industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world- market, for which the discovery of America
paved the way.
This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to
communication by land.
This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in
proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same
proportion the bourgeoisie developed,
increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from
the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long
course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and
of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a
corresponding political advance of that class.
An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-
governing association in the mediaeval commune; here independent urban republic
(as in Italy and Germany), there taxable
"third estate" of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of
manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in
fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last,
since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for
itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.
The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, 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 remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-
interest, than callous "cash payment."
It has drowned 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 and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom--Free Trade.
In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and
looked up to with reverent awe.
It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science,
into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has
reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour
in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists 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 revolutionising the instruments
of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society.
Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary,
the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch
from all earlier ones.
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last
compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations
with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie
over the whole surface of the globe.
It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions
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 Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry
the national ground on which it stood.
All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being
destroyed.
They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death
question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up
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 productions 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 civilisation.
The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down
all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of
foreigners to capitulate.
It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of
production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their
midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
In 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 civilised 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 production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.
The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation.
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws,
governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one
government, one code of laws, one national
class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive
and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to
industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of
whole continents for cultivation,
canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground--what earlier
century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of
social labour?
We see then: 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
organisation 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 to it, and by the economical and political sway of the
bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property,
a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no
longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his
spells.
For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of
the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production,
against the property relations that are the
conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule.
It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put
on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois
society.
In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the
previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.
In these crises there breaks out 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 civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much
industry, too much commerce.
The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the
development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become
too powerful for these conditions, by which
they are fettered, and 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 inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by
the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.
That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and
by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now
turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has
also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons--the modern working
class--the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same
proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed--a class of
labourers, who live only so long as they
find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.
These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every
other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the
vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for
the workman.
He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most
monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.
Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the
means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of
his race.
But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of
production.
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the
wage decreases.
Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases,
in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of
the working hours, by increase of the work
exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the
great factory of the industrial capitalist.
Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers.
As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect
hierarchy of officers and sergeants.
Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are
daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the
individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.
The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty,
the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words,
the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by
that of women.
Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the
working class.
All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age
and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an
end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions
of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class--the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, 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 the new methods of production.
Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development.
With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie.
At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the
workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality,
against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them.
They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but
against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares
that compete with their labour, they smash
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 labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole
country, and broken up by their mutual competition.
If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of
their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to
attain its own political ends, is compelled
to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover 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 bourgeoisie.
Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the
bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number;
it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that
strength more.
The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat
are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions
of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.
The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial
crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating.
The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their
livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and
individual bourgeois take more and more the
character of collisions between two classes.
Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the
bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found
permanent associations in order to make
provision beforehand for these occasional revolts.
Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time.
The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-
expanding union of the workers.
This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by
modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one
another.
It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles,
all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.
But every class struggle is a political struggle.
And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their
miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways,
achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political
party, is continually being upset again by the 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 times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries.
In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to
ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena.
The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of
political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with
weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the
advance of industry, precipitated into the 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 process of
dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of
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 really revolutionary class.
The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry;
the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan,
the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their
existence as fractions of the middle class.
They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative.
Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.
If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending
transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future
interests, they desert their own standpoint
to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The "dangerous class," the social ***, that passively rotting mass thrown off by
the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a
proletarian revolution; its conditions of
life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue.
In the conditions 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
industrial labour, 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
interests of minorities.
The proletarian movement is the self- conscious, independent movement of the
immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.
The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise
itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung
into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the
bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle.
The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with
its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced
the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point
where that war breaks out into open
revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for
the sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the
antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under
which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence.
The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just
as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into
a bourgeois.
The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of
industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class.
He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.
And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the
ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an
over-riding law.
It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its
slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state,
that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.
Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence
is no longer compatible with society.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is
the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour.
Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers.
The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the
isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary
combination, due to association.
The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the
very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products.
What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers.
Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.