diff --git a/share/docs/manifesto.texi b/share/docs/manifesto.texi
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f17871d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/share/docs/manifesto.texi
@@ -0,0 +1,1318 @@
+\input texinfo
+@settitle Manifesto of the Communist Party
+
+@titlepage
+@title Manifesto of the Communist Party
+@page
+@end titlepage
+
+@contents
+@top Manifesto of the Communist Party
+
+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:
+
+@enumerate
+
+@item Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself 
+a power.
+
+@item 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.
+
+@end enumerate
+
+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.
+
+@menu
+* Bourgeois and Proletarians::
+* Proletarians and Communists::
+* Socialist and Communist Literature::
+* Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties::
+@end menu
+
+@node Bourgeois and Proletarians
+@chapter 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 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 
+manufacturer 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 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 
+its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, 
+commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the 
+bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background 
+every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
+
+We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long 
+course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production 
+and of exchange.
+
+Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a 
+corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the 
+sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the 
+medieval 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 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 
+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 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 honoured 
+and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the 
+lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
+
+The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has 
+reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
+
+The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of 
+vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its 
+fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to 
+show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far 
+surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has 
+conducted 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 entire 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 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 civilisation. 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 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 
+population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property 
+in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation.
+ Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, 
+laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one 
+nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, 
+one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
+
+The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more 
+massive and more colossal productive forces than 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 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 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 by enforced 
+destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of 
+new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to 
+say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by 
+diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
+
+The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now 
+turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
+
+But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to 
+itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those 
+weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.
+
+In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same 
+proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class 
+of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only 
+so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell 
+themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, 
+and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all 
+the fluctuations of the market.
+
+Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the 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 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 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 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 overlooker, 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, 
+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 
+specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the 
+proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
+
+The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth 
+begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on 
+by individual labourers, then by the workpeople 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 
+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 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 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 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 (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 proletarian, 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 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 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 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”, [lumpenproletariat] 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 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 
+interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, 
+independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense 
+majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot 
+stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of 
+official society being sprung into the air.
+
+Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the 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 
+labourer, 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 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 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-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the 
+labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the 
+bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by 
+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. 
+
+@node Proletarians and Communists
+@chapter 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 mould the proletarian movement.
+
+The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this 
+only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different 
+countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the 
+entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages 
+of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie 
+has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the 
+movement as a whole.
+
+The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced 
+and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that 
+section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, 
+they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly 
+understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general 
+results of the proletarian movement.
+
+The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all 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 favour of 
+bourgeois property.
+
+The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property 
+generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois 
+private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of 
+producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on 
+the exploitation of the many by the few.
+
+In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single 
+sentence: Abolition of private property.
+
+We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of 
+personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which 
+property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and 
+independence.
+
+Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of 
+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-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It 
+creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and 
+which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of 
+wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on 
+the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this 
+antagonism.
+
+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-labour.
+
+The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of 
+the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in 
+bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates 
+by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare 
+existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the 
+products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and 
+reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command 
+the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable 
+character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to 
+increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the 
+ruling class requires it.
+
+In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated 
+labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to 
+enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
+
+In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist 
+society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is 
+independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and 
+has no individuality.
+
+And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, 
+abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of 
+bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is 
+undoubtedly aimed at.
+
+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 Communistic abolition of 
+buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the 
+bourgeoisie itself.
+
+You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in 
+your existing society, private property is already done away with for 
+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 labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or 
+rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, 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 labour 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 of its members who work, acquire nothing, 
+and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but 
+another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any 
+wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
+
+All objections urged against the 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, &c. 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 springing from your present mode of 
+production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear 
+in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling 
+class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient 
+property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course 
+forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
+
+Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this 
+infamous proposal of the Communists.
+
+On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On 
+capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists 
+only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in 
+the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public 
+prostitution.
+
+The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement 
+vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
+
+Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their 
+parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
+
+But, you 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, &c.? The Communists have not invented the 
+intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character 
+of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling 
+class.
+
+The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed 
+co-relation 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 labour.
+
+But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie 
+in chorus.
+
+The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears that 
+the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, 
+can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will 
+likewise fall to the women.
+
+He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with 
+the status of women as mere instruments of production.
+
+For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our 
+bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and 
+officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to 
+introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
+
+Our bourgeois, not content with having 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 
+legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the 
+abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition 
+of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution 
+both public and private.
+
+The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and 
+nationality.
+
+The 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 civilised countries at least, is one of the 
+first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
+
+In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another 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 revolutionise 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 18th 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 
+juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. 
+But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly 
+survived this change.”
+
+“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are 
+common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it 
+abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a 
+new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical 
+experience.”
+
+What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society 
+has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that 
+assumed different forms at different epochs.
+
+But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, 
+viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, 
+that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the 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 property 
+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 centralise all instruments of production in 
+the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling 
+class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
+
+Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of 
+despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois 
+production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically 
+insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip 
+themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are 
+unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
+
+These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
+
+Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty 
+generally applicable.
+
+@enumerate
+
+@item Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to 
+public purposes.
+
+@item A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
+
+@item Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
+
+@item Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
+
+@item Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a 
+national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
+
+@item Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands 
+of the State.
+
+@item 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.
+@item Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, 
+especially for agriculture.
+
+@item 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.
+
+@item Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of 
+children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with 
+industrial production, &c, &c.
+
+@end enumerate
+
+When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and 
+all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the 
+whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political 
+power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for 
+oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie 
+is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, 
+if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, 
+sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along 
+with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of 
+class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished 
+its own supremacy as a class.
+
+In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, 
+we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the 
+condition for the free development of all. 
+
+@node Socialist and Communist Literature
+@chapter Socialist and Communist Literature
+
+@node Reactionary Socialism
+@section Reactionary Socialism
+
+@node Feudal Socialism
+@subsection 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[A], 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 their indictment against 
+the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, 
+the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new 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 régime a class is being developed which is destined 
+to cut up root and branch the old order of society.
+
+What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a 
+proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.
+
+In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against 
+the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, 
+they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and 
+to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and 
+potato spirits.
+
+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.
+
+@node Petty-Bourgeois Socialism 
+@subsection 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 civilisation has become fully developed, a new class 
+of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and 
+bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois 
+society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly 
+hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern 
+industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will 
+completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be 
+replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs 
+and shopmen.
+
+In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of 
+the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat 
+against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois 
+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 labour; the concentration of capital and land in a 
+few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of 
+the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in 
+production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the 
+industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral 
+bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
+
+In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to 
+restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old 
+property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of 
+production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations 
+that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, 
+it is both reactionary and Utopian.
+
+Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in 
+agriculture.
+
+Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating 
+effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of 
+the blues.
+
+@node German or “True” Socialism
+@subsection 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 Socialist demands, of hurling the 
+traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, 
+against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois 
+legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses 
+that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois 
+movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French 
+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 recognised, more and more, its own calling as 
+the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.
+
+It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty 
+Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model 
+man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary 
+of 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. 
+
+@node Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism
+@section Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism
+
+A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order 
+to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
+
+To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers 
+of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of 
+societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, 
+hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism 
+has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
+
+We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.
+
+The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions 
+without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire 
+the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating 
+elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie 
+naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and 
+bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or 
+less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a 
+system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but 
+requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of 
+existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the 
+bourgeoisie.
+
+A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism 
+sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working 
+class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the 
+material conditions of existence, in 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 labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify 
+the administrative work, of bourgeois government.
+
+Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it 
+becomes a mere figure of speech.
+
+Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the 
+benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working 
+class. 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. 
+
+@node Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism
+@section 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 organisation of the proletariat to an organisation 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 favoured. 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 mere 
+superintendence of production — all these proposals point solely to the 
+disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just 
+cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their 
+earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are 
+of a purely Utopian character.
+
+The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse 
+relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle 
+develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the 
+contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all 
+theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these 
+systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every 
+case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of 
+their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the 
+proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the 
+class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of 
+experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated 
+“phalansteres”, of establishing “Home Colonies”, or setting up a “Little 
+Icaria” — duodecimo 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 [or] 
+conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more 
+systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the 
+miraculous effects of their social science.
+
+They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the 
+working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind 
+unbelief in the new Gospel.
+
+The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose 
+the Chartists and the Réformistes. 
+
+@node Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties
+@chapter 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 Cracow 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 civilisation 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 labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic 
+parties of all countries.
+
+The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare 
+that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing 
+social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. 
+The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to 
+win.
+
+Working Men of All Countries, Unite! 
+
+@bye