StupidOS/share/doc/manifesto.texi

\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