In the new Multi-capitalist future, the poor and middle-class will no longer be divided by you! The next time you tell the peasant that the serf has more money, we will both turn to you and notice that you are standing in the balcony of a billion dollar castle with a treasure room full of our taxed gold.
May the Kings quake in their boots at the UNITING of the Poor (proletarian - peasant) and the Middle-class (bourgeoisie - serf)... WE WILL NO LONGER BE DIVIDED BY YOU!!!!
Poor and Middle-class of the world,... UNITE!!!
The Communist League, an international association of workers, which
could of course be only a secret one, under conditions obtaining at the
time, commissioned us, the undersigned, at the Congress held in London in
November 1847, to write for publication a detailed theoretical and practical
programme for the Party. Such was the origin of the following Manifesto,
the manuscript of which travelled to London to be printed a few weeks before
the February Revolution. First published in German, it has been republished
in that language in at least twelve different editions in Germany, England,
and America. It was published in English for the first time in 1850 in the
Red Republican, London, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and in 1871
in at least three different translations in America. The french version
first appeared in Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848, and
recently in Le Socialiste of New York. A new translation is in the course
of preparation. A Polish version appeared in London shortly after it was
first published in Germany. A Russian translation was published in Geneva
in the 'sixties. Into Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its appearance.
However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five
years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole,
as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved.
The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto
itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions
for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is
laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That
passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view
of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying
improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the
practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then,
still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time
held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details
been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the
Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made
state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." (See _The Civil
War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working
Men's Assocation, 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further,
it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient
in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also
that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition
parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice
are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed,
and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion
of the political parties there enumerated.
But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no
longer any right to alter. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with
an introduction bridging the gap from 1847 to the present day; but this
reprint was too unexpected to leave us time for that.
KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS June 24, 1872 London
PREFACE TO 1882 RUSSIAN EDITION
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated
by Bakunin, was published early in the 'sixties by the printing office of
the Kolokol. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto)
only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December
1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position of the Communists
in relation to the various opposition parties in various countries. Precisely
Russia and the United States are missing here. It was the time when Russia
constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United
States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through immigration.
Both countries provided Europe with raw materials and were at the same time
markets for the sale of its industrial products. Bother were, therefore,
in one way of another, pillars of the existing European system.
How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North American
for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking the
very foundations of European landed property large and small. At the same
time, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial
resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial
monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now.
Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself.
Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis
of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of
giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous
concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the
industrial regions.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes,
but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the
proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was
proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war
of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary
action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable
impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find,
face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist
swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half
the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian
obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership
of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership?
Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution
such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution
becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both
complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may
serve as the starting point for a communist development.
KARL MARX
FREDERICK ENGELS
January 21, 1882
London
PREFACE TO 1883 GERMAN EDITION
The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man
to whom the whole working class class of Europe and America owes more than
to any one else - rests at Highgate Cemetary and over his grave the first
first grass is already growing. Since his death [March 13, 1883], there
can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But
I consider it all the more necessary again to state the following expressly:
The basic thought running through the Manifesto - that economic production,
and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising
therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual
history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of
the primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history
of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between
dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution;
that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited
and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from
the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at
the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression,
class struggles - this basic thought belongs soley and exclusively to Marx.
ENGELS FOOTNOTE TO PARAGRAPH: "This proposition", I wrote in the
preface to the English translation, "which, in my opinion, is destined
to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we both of
us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I
had independently progressed towards it is best shown by my Conditions of
the Working Class in England. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in
spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms
almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here."
I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary
that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.
FREDERICK ENGELS June 28, 1883 London
PREFACE TO 1888 ENGLISH EDITION
The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working
men's association, first exclusively German, later on international, and
under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably
a secret society. At a Congress of the League,
held in November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete
theoretical and practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January
1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before
the French Revolution of February 24. A French translation was brought out
in Paris shortly before the insurrection of June 1848. The first English
translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney's
_Red Republican, London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been
published.
The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 - the first great battle
between proletariat and bourgeoisie - drove again into the background, for
a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class.
Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was, again, as it had been before
the Revolution of February, solely between different sections of the propertied
class; the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room,
and to the position of extreme wing of the middle-class Radicals. Wherever
independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they
were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central
Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were
arrested and, after eighteen months' imprisonment, they were tried in October
1852. This selebrated "Cologne Communist Trial" lasted from October
4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment
in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately after the sentence,
the League was formlly dissolved by the remaining members. As to the Manifesto,
it seemed henceforth doomed to oblivion.
When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for another
attack on the ruling classes, the International Working Men's Association
sprang up. But this association, formed with the express aim of welding
into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could
not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto. The International
was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English
trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy, and
Spain, and to the Lassalleans in Germany.
[ENGEL'S FOOTNOTE: Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself
to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto.
But in his first public agitation, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond demanding
co-operative worhsops supported by state credit.]Marx, who drew up this
programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual
development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined
action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle
against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help
bringing home to men's minds the insufficiency of their various favorite
nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true
conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International,
on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what
it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany,
were dying out, and even the conservative English trade unions, though most
of them had long since severed their connection with the International,
were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea,
their president could say in their name: "Continental socialism has
lost its terror for us." In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had
made considerable headway among the working men of all countries.
The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since 1850, the German
text had been reprinted several times in Switzerland, England, and America.
In 1872, it was translated into English in New York, where the translation
was published in Woorhull and Claflin's Weekly. From this English version,
a French one was made in Le Socialiste of New
York. Since then, at least two more English translations, moer or less mutilated,
have been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in
England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin, was published at
Herzen's Kolokol office in Geneva, about 1863; a second one, by the heroic
Vera Zasulich, also in Geneva, in 1882. A new Danish edition is to be found
in Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation
in Le Socialiste, Paris, 1886. From this latter, a Spanish version was prepared
and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted;
there have been twelve altogether at the least. An Armenian translation,
which was to be published in Constantinople some months ago, did not see
the light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a
book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator declined to call
it his own production. Of further translations into other languages I have
heard but had not seen. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects the history
of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most
wide spread, the most international production of all socialist literature,
the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia
to California.
Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto.
By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of
the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France,
both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually
dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by
all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital
and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the
working-class movement, and looking rather to the "educated" classes
for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced
of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the
necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a crude,
rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the
cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce
the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany. Thus,
in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class
movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, "respectable";
communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning,
was that "the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working
class itself," there could be no doubt as to which of the two names
we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.
The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state
that the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus belongs to Marx.
That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, th prevailing mode
of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily
following from it, form the basis upon which it is built up, and from that
which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that
epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution
of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been
a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited,
ruling and oppressed classes; That the history of these class struggles
forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached
where the exploited and oppressed class - the proletariat - cannot attain
its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class - the
bourgeoisie - without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating
society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and
class struggles.
This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what
Darwin's theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually
approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed
towards it is best shown by my Conditions of the Working Class in England.
But when I again met Marx at Brussels,
in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms
almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.
From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the following:
"However much that state of things may have altered during the last
twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are,
on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might
be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as
the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical
conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special
stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section
II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today.
In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the
accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in
view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution,
and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the
first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has
in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the
Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made
state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." (See _The Civil
War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working
Men's Assocation_ 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further,
it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient
in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also
that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition
parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice
are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed,
and the progress of history has swept from off the Earth the greater portion
of the political parties there enumerated.
"But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we
have no longer any right to alter."
The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater
portion of Marx's Capital. We have revised it in common, and I have added
a few notes explanatory of historical allusions.
FREDERICK ENGELS January 30, 1888 London
PREFACE TO 1890 GERMAN EDITION
Since [the 1883 German edition preface] was written, a new German edition
of the Manifesto has again become necessary, and much has also happened
to the Manifesto which should be recorded here.
A second Russian translation - by Vera Zasulich - appeared in Geneva
in 1882; the preface to that edition was written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately,
the original German manuscript has gone astray; I must therefore retranslate
from the Russian which will in no way improve the text. It reads:
"The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,
translated by Bakunin, was published early in the 'sixties by the printing
office of the Kolokol. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition
of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible
today.
"What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that
time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position
of the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various
countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It was
the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European
reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces
of Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw materials
and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products.
Both were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing European
system.
"How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North
American for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking
the very foundations of European landed property -- large and small. At
the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial
resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial
monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now.
Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself.
Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis
of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of
giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous
concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the
industrial regions.
"And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European
princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation
from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The
Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner
of war of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary
action in Europe.
"The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the
inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia
we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and
bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned
in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina,
though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership of land,
pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the
contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such
as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
"The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution
becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both
complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may
serve as the starting point for a communist development.
"January 21, 1882 London"
At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: Manifest
Kommunistyczny.
Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the Socialdemokratisk
Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885. Unfortunately, it is not quite complete; certain
essential passages, which seem to have presented difficulties to the translator,
have been omitted, and, in addition, there are saigns of carelessness here
and there, which are all the more unpleasantly conspicuous since the translation
indicates that had the translator taken a little more pains, he would have
done an excellent piece of work.
A new French version appeared in 1886, in Le Socialiste of Paris; it
is the best published to date.
From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in El Socialista
of Madrid, and then reissued in pamphlet form: Manifesto del Partido Communista
por Carlos Marx y F. Engels, Madrid, Administracion de El Socialista, Hernan
Cortes 8.
As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the manuscript of an
Armenian translation was offered to a publisher in Constantinople. But the
good man did not have the courage to publish something bearing the name
of Marx and suggested that the translator set down his own name as author,
which the latter however declined.
After one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate American translations
had been repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version at last appeared
in 1888. This was my friend Samuel Moore, and we went through it together
once more before it went to press. It is entitled: Manifesto of the Communist
Party , by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorized English translation,
edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, London, William Reeves,
185 Fleet Street, E.C. I have added some of the notes of that edition to
the present one. The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with
enthusiasm, at the time of its appearance, by the not at all numerous vanguard
of scientific socialism (as is proved by the translations mentioned in the
first place), it was soon forced into the background by the reaction that
began with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally
excommunicated "by law" in the conviction of the Cologne Communists
in November 1852. With the disappearance from the public scene of the workers'
movement that had begun with the February Revolution, the Manifesto too
passed into the background.
When the European workers had again gathered sufficient strength for a new
onslaught upon the power of the ruling classes, the International Working
Men's Association came into being. Its aim was to weld together into one
huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and America. Therefore
it could not set out from the principles laid down in the Manifesto. It
was bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on the English
trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish Proudhonists, and
the German Lassalleans. This programme - the considerations underlying the
Statutes of the International - was drawn up by Marx with a master hand
acknowledged even by the Bakunin and the anarchists. For the ultimate final
triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon
the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily has
to ensue from united action and discussion. The events and vicissitudes
in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the successes,
could not but demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy of their former
universal panaceas, and make their minds more receptive to a thorough understanding
of the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right.
The working class of 1874, at the dissolution of the International, was
altogether different from that of 1864, at its foundation. Proudhonism in
the Latin countries, and the specific Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying
out; and even the ten arch-conservative English trade unions were gradually
approaching the point where, in 1887, the chairman of their Swansea Congress
could say in their name: "Continental socialism has lost its terror
for us." Yet by 1887 continental socialism was almost exclusively the
theory heralded in the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent, the history
of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement
since 1848. At present, it is doubtless the most widely circulated, the
most international product of all socialist literature, the common programme
of many millions of workers of all countries from Siberia to California.
Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a
socialist manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were considered socialists.
On the one hand were the adherents of the various utopian systems, notably
the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at
that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out. On the
other, the manifold types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social
abuses through their various universal panaceas and all kinds of patch-work,
without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, people who
stood outside the labor movement and who looked for support rather to the
"educated" classes. The section of the working class, however,
which demanded a radical reconstruction of society, convinced that mere
political revolutions were not enough, then called itself Communist. It
was still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude communism.
Yet, it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of utopian communism
- in France, the "Icarian" communists of Cabet, and in Germany
that of Weitling. Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism
a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite
respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And since we were
very decidely of the opinion as early as then that "the emancipation
of the workers must be the task of the working class itself," we could
have no hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor has
it ever occured to us to repudiate it.
"Working men of all countries, unite!" But few voices responded
when we proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of
the first Paris Revolution in which the proletariat came out with the demands
of its own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of most of
the Western European countries joined hands in the International Working
Men's Association of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived
only nine years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries
created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better
witness than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European
and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for
the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate
aim: the standard eight hour working day to be established by legal enactment,
as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again
by the Paris Workers' Congress of 1889. And today's spectacle will open
the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to
the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!
FREDERICK ENGELS May 1, 1890
London
PREFACE TO THE 1892 POLISH EDITION
The fact that a new Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto has become
necessary gives rise to various thoughts.
First of all, it is noteworthy that of late the Manifesto has become an
index, as it were, of the development of large scale industry on the European
continent. In proportion as large scale industry expands in a given country,
the demand grows among the workers of that country for enlightenment regarding
their position as the working class in relation to the possessing classes,
the socialist movement spreads among them and the demand for the Manifesto
increases. Thus, not only the state of the labor movement but also the degree
of development of large-scale industry can be measured with fair accuracy
in every country by the number of copies of the Manifesto circulated in
the language of that country.
Accordingly, the new Polish edition indicates a decided progress of
Polish industry. And there can be no doubt whatever that this progress since
the previous edition published ten years ago has actually taken place. Russian
Poland, Congress Poland, has become the big industrial region of the Russian
Empire. Whereas Russian large-scale industry is scattered sporadically -
a part round the Gulf of Finland, another in the center (Moscow and Vladimir),
a third along the coasts of the Black and Azov seas, and still others elsewhere
- Polish industry has been packed into a relatively small area and enjoys
both the advantages and the disadvantages arising from such concentration.
The competing Russian manufacturers acknowledged the advantages when they
demanded protective tariffs against Poland, in spite of their ardent desire
to transform the Poles into Russians. The disadvantages - for the Polish
manufacturers and the Russian government - are manifest in the rapid spread
of socialist ideas among the Polish workers and in the growing demand for
the Manifesto.
But the rapid development of Polish industry, outstripping that of
Russia, is in its turn a new proof of the inexhaustible vitality of the
Polish people and a new guarantee of its impending national restoration.
And the restoration of an independent strong Poland is a matter which concerns
not only the Poles but all of us. A sincere international collaboration
of the European nations is possible only if each of these nations is fully
autonomous in its own house. The Revolution of 1848, which under the banner
of the proletariat, after all, merely let the proletarian fighters do the
work of the bourgeoisie, also secured the independence of Italy, Germany,
and Hungary through its testamentary executors, Louis Bonaparte and Bismarck;
but Poland, which since 1792 had done more for the revolution than all these
three together, was left to its own resources when it succumbed in 1863
to a tenfold greater Russian force. The nobility could neither maintain
nor regain Polish independence; today, to the bourgeoisie, this independence
is, to say the least, immaterial. Nevertheless, it is a necessity for the
harmonious collaboration of the European nations. It can be gained only
by the young Polish proletariat, and in its hands it is secure. For the
workers of all the rest of Europe need the independence of Poland just as
much as the Polish workers themselves.
Friedrich Engels
London, February 10, 1892
PREFACE TO THE 1893 ITALIAN EDITION
To the Italian Reader
Publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party coincided, one may
say, with March 18, 1848, the day of the revolutions in Milan and Berlin,
which were armed uprisings of the two nations situated in the center, the
one, of the continent of Europe, the other, of the Mediterranean; two nations
until then enfeebled by division and internal strife, and thus fallen under
foreign domination. While Italy was subject to the Emperor of Austria, Germany
underwent the yoke, not less effective though more indirect, of the tsar
of all the Russias. The consequences of March 18, 1848, freed both Italy
and Germany from this disgrace; if from 1848 to 1871 these two great nations
were reconstituted and somehow again put on their own, it was, as Karl Marx
used to say, because the men who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were,
nevertheless, its testamentary executors in spite of themselves.
Everywhere that revolution was the work of the working class; it was the
latter that built the barricades and paid with its lifeblood. Only the Paris
workers, in overthrowing the government, had the very definite intention
of overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But conscious though they were of
the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie,
still, neither the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual
development of the mass of French workers had as yet reached the stage which
would have made a social reconstruction possible. In the final analysis,
therefore, the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class.
In the other countries, in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, the workers, from
the very outset, did nothing but raise the bourgeoisie to power. But in
any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible without national independence.
Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the unity and
autonomy of the nations that had lacked them up to then: Italy, Germany,
Hungary. Poland will follow in turn.
Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved
the way, prepared the ground for the latter. Through the impetus given to
large scale industry in all countries, the bourgeois regime during the last
forty five years has everywhere created a numerous, concentrated, and powerful
proletariat. It has thus raised, to use the language of the Manifesto, its
own grave-diggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation,
it will be impossible to achieve the international union of the proletariat,
or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of these nations toward common
aims. Just imagine joint international action by the Italian, Hungarian,
German, Polish, and Russian workers under the political conditions preceding
1848!
The battles fought in 1848 were thus not fought in vain. Nor have the forty
five years separating us from that revolutionary epoch passed to no purpose.
The fruits are ripening, and all I wish is that the publication of this
Italian translation may augur as well for the victory of the Italian proletariat
as the publication of the original did for the international revolution.
The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism
in the past. The first capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal
Middle Ages and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a
colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages
and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300,a new historical era
is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour
of birth of this new, proletarian era?
Friedrich Engels London, February, 1, 1893
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
MANIFESTOOF THE COMMUNIST PARTY 1848
A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism. All the
powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German
police spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic
by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back
the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition
parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself
a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole
world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this
nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London
and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French,
German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing society [2] is the history of class
struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master [3]
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, plebians, slaves; in
the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,
serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established
new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place
of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct
feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more
and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest
towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground
for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation
of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange
and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry,
an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element
in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized
by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new
markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were
pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between
the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor
in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers
no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial
production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY;
the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the
leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery
of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to
commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has,
in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry,
commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie
developed, increased its capital, and
pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a
long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production
and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding
political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the
feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune
[4]: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable
"third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward, in the
period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi - feudal or the
absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact,
cornerstone of the great monarchies in general - the bourgeoisie has at
last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market,
conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political
sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing
the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper
hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural
superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than
naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned
out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm,
of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.
It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the
numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable
freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious
and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal
exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored
and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the
lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and
has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display
of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its
fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first
to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders
far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals;
it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of
nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments
of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the
whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production
in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence
for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty
and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All
fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy
is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie
over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given
a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet
of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national
industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged
by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question
for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous
raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries
whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the
globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country,
we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant
lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,
we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual
creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness
and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous
national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,
by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the
most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities
are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate
hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction,
to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce
what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has
created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared
with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population
from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and
semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants
on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state
of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated
population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property
in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization.
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests,
laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into
one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest,
one frontier, and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created
more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application
of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric
telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or
rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century
had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap
of social labor?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation
the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a
certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange,
the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal
organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the
feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already
developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be
burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway
of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society,
with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society
that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange,
is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the
nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past,
the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of
modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against
the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the
bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises
that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois
society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great
part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created
productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks
out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity
- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back
into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal
war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence;
industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too
much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too
much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer
tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property;
on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by
which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they
bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence
of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow
to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get
over these crises? One the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of
productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by
the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving
the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing
the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are
now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those
weapons - the modern working class - the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same
proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed - a class
of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work
only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must
sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of
commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition,
to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the
work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently,
all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it
is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack,
that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted,
almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance,
and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore
also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore,
as the
repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in
proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the
same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation
of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time,
or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master
into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers,
crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the
industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy
of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class,
and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,
by the overlooker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer
himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and
aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in
other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the
labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have
no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are
instruments of labor, more or less expensive
No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far
at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the
other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker,
etc.
The lower strata of the middle class - the small tradespeople, shopkeepers,
and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants - all these
sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital
does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and
is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because
their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.
Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth
begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first, the contest is carried
on by individual laborers, then by the work of people of a factory, then
by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois
who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois
condition of production, but against the instruments of production themselves;
they destroy imported wares that compete with their labor, they smash to
pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force
the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over
the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere
they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence
of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class,
in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole
proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At
this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but
the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners,
the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical
movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory
so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases
in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows,
and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of
life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in
proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition
among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages
of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery,
ever more rapidly developing, makes
their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual
workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions
between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade
unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the
rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision
beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks
out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit
of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding
union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication
that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different
localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was
needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character,
into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is
a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the
Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern
proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into
a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between
the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.
It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers,
by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus,
the Ten-Hours Bill in England was carried.
Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in
many ways the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie
finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy;
later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests
have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the
bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled
to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus to drag it into
the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat
with its own elements of political and general education, in other words,
it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are,
by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at
least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the
proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress
of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole
range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a
small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary
class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore,
at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie,
so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in
particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves
to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a
whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the
proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes
decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat
is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan,
the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction
their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not
revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are
reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance,
they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer
into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future
interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that
of the proletariat.
The "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting
mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there,
be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of
life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue.
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already
virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to
his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois
family relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the
same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him
of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him
so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois
interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their
already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions
of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive
forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation,
and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing
of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous
securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the
interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense
majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot
stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole 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 laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process
of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of
his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly
than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie
is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its
conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to
rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within
his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state,
that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer
live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer
compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois
class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital
is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers.
The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie,
replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary
combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore,
cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces
and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above
all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat
are equally inevitable.
FOOTNOTES
[1] By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the
means of social production and employers of wage labor.
By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of
production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order
to live. Note by Engels - 1888 English edition
[2] That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the
social organization existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown.
Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership
of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation
from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village
communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society
everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive
communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's
(1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation
to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeaval communities, society
begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes.
I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in Der Ursprung der Familie,
des Privateigenthumus und des Staats_, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886.
[Engels, 1888 English edition]
[3] Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not
a head of a guild. [Engels: 1888 English edition]
[4] This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy
and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of
self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels: 1890 German edition]
"Commune" was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even
before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government
and political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally speaking,
for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken
as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels:
1888 English edition]
II - PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class
parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat
as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to
shape and mold the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by
this only:
(1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries,
they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire
proletariat, independently of all nationality.
(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working
class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere
represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced
and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that
section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically,
they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly
understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general
results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian
parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois
supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas
or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be
universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an
existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very
eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive
feature of communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical
change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution,
for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property
generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois
private property is the final and most complete expression of the system
of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms,
on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single
sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right
of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which
property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity
and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property
of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded
the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of
industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying
it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It
creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor,
and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply
of wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is
based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides
of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social
STATUS in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united
action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action
of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property
of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed
into social property. It is only the social character of the property that
is changed. It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage labor.
The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum
of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer
in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates
by means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence.
We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products
of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction
of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor
of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of
this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital,
and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class
requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated
labor. In communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen,
to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist
society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society, capital is
independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent
and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition
of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois
individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly
aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production,
free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears
also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave
words" of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if
any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered
traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the communist
abolition of buying and selling, or the bourgeois conditions of production,
and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But
in your existing society, private property is already done away with for
nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to
its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore,
with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition
for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense
majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money,
or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the
moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois
property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no
other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property.
This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society;
all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of
others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work
will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the
dogs through sheer idleness; for those who acquire anything, do not work.
The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology:
There can no longer be any wage labor when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating
material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the communistic
mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the
bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production
itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the
disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority,
a mere training to act as a machine.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition
of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom,
culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions
of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence
is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential
character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence
of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws
of nature and of reason the social forms stringing from your present mode
of production and form of property -- historical relations that rise and
disappear in the progress of production -- this misconception you share
with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the
case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property,
you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form
of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous
proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On
capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family
exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement
in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public
prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their
parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace
home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social
conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect,
of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended
the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the
character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence
of the ruling class.
The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed
correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more,
by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians
are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of
commerce and instruments of labor.
But you Communists would introduce community or women, screams the bourgeoisie
in chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that
the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally,
can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will
likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with
the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of
our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly
and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need
to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians
at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest
pleasure in seducing each other's wives. (Ah, those were the days!)
Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus,
at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that
they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed,
an openly legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident
that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it
the abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution
both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries
and nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have
not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy,
must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself
the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois
sense of the word.
National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more
vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce,
to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the
conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.
United action of the leading civilized countries at least is one of the
first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also
be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be
put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the
nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an
end.
The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and,
generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious
examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and
conception, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change
in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and
in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production
changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The
ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express
that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been
created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with
the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth
century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with
the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom
of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within
the domain of knowledge.
"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical,
and juridicial ideas have been modified in the course of historical development.
But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly
survived this change."
"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc.,
that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal
truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting
them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical
experience."
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society
has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that
assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages,
viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then,
that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity
and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas,
which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class
antagonisms.
The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations;
no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional
ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism.
We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working
class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win
the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all
capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production
in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling
class; and to increase the total productive forces as
rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of
despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois
production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient
and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves,
necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable
as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally
applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application
of all rents of
land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income
tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks
of the state, by means of a
national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly on leading and
setting interest rates.
6. Centralization of the means of communication
and transport in he hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments
of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste
lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common
plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial
armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition
of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution
of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's
factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial
production, etc.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared,
and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association
of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one
class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with
the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize
itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling
class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production,
then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions
for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will
thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,
we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all.
SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE
1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM
a. Feudal Socialism
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies
of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society.
In the French Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation,
these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth,
a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary
battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature, the
old cries of the restoration period had become impossible. [1]
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight,
apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against
the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus,
the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters
and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half
an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter,
witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's
core, but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend
the march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian
alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them,
saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with
loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England" exhibited
this spectacle:
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of
the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances
and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In
showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they
forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own
form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their
criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this:
that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed which is destined
to cut up, root and branch, the old order of society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a
proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all corrective measures against
the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high falutin' phrases,
they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry,
and to barter truth, love, and honor, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar,
and potato spirits. [2]
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has clerical
socialism with feudal socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge. Has
not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against
the state? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty,
celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church?
Christian socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates
the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
b. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie,
not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the
atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small
peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those
countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially,
these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new
class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat
and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself a supplementary part of bourgeois
society. The individual members of this class, however, as being constantly
hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as Modern
Industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely
disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in
manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half
of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat
against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois
regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint
of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working
class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois socialism. Sismondi was the head of this
school, not only in France but also in England.
This school of socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions
in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies
of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery
and division of labor; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands;
overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty
bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production,
the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war
of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of
the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
In it positive aims, however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring
the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property
relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production
and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that
have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case,
it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations
in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating
effects of self-deception, this form of socialism ended in a miserable hangover.
c. German or "True" Socialism
The socialist and communist literature of France, a literature that originated
under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions
of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time
when the bourgeoisie in that country had just begun its contest with feudal
absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters),
eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when these writings
immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated
along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature
lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed a purely literary
aspect. Thus, to
the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first
French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of "Practical
Reason" in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary
French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure will, of will
as it was bound to be, of true human will generally.
The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French
ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather,
in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point
of view.
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is
appropriated, namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic saints over
the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been
written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French
literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original.
For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of
money, they wrote "alienation of humanity", and beneath the French
criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote "dethronement of the category
of the general", and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the
French historical criticisms, they dubbed "Philosophy of Action",
"True Socialism", "German Science of Socialism", "Philosophical
Foundation of Socialism", and so on.
The French socialist and communist literature was thus completely emasculated.
And, since it ceased, in the hands of the German, to express the struggle
of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome "French
one-sidedness" and of representing, not true requirements, but the
requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests
of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality,
who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly,
and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion, meanwhile
gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against
feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement,
became more earnest.
By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to "True"
Socialism of confronting the political movement with the socialistic demands,
of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative
government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press,
bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching
to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by
this bourgeois movement. German socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that
the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence
of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions
of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things
those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors,
country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against
the threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with
which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class
risings.
While this "True" Socialism thus served the government as a weapon
for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented
a reactionary interest, the interest of German philistines. In Germany,
the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then
constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social
basis of the existing state of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany.
The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with
certain destruction -- on the one hand, from the concentration of capital;
on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True"
Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like
an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped
in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German
Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths", all skin and
bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such
a public. And on its part German socialism recognized, more and more, its
own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty
philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model
man, it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary
of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing
the "brutally destructive" tendency of communism, and of proclaiming
its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few
exceptions, all the so-called socialist and communist publications that
now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating
literature. [3]
2. CONSERVATIVE OR BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in
order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers
of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of
societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals,
temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.
This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon's _Philosophy of Poverty_ as an example of this form.
The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions
without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They
desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating
elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie
naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and
bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more
or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such
a system, and thereby to march straightaway into the social New Jerusalem,
it but requires in reality that the proletariat should remain within the
bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning
the bourgeoisie.
A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism
sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working
class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the
material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any
advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this
form of socialism, however, by no
means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an
abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative
reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore,
that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but,
at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois
government.
Bourgeois socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it
becomes a mere figure of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for
the benefit of the working class. Prison reform: for the benefit of the
working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of
bourgeois socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois - for the benefit
of the working class.
3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution,
has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings
of Babeuf [4] 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
[5], Fourier [6], Owen [7], and others, spring into existence in the early
undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat
and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well
as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society.
But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle
of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political
movement.
Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development
of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer
to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws,
that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically
created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous
class organization of the proletariat to an organization of society especially
contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes,
into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for
the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only
from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat
exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings,
causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all
class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of
society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to
society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference,
to the ruling class. For how can people when once they understand their
system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state
of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action;
they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to
failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social
gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat
is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception
of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of
that class for a general reconstruction of society.
But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical element.
They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of
the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class.
The practical measures proposed in them - such as the abolition of the distinction
between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries
for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation
of social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more
superintendence of production -- all these proposals point solely to the
disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping
up, and which, in these publications, are recognized in their earliest indistinct
and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian
character.
The significance of critical-utopian socialism and communism bears an inverse
relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle
develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the
contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all
theoretical justifications. Therefore, although the originators of these
systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in
every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original
views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development
of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to
deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still
dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated
_phalansteres_, of establishing "Home Colonies", or setting up
a "Little Icaria" [8] -- pocket editions of the New Jerusalem
-- and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal
to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into
the category of the reactionary conservative socialists depicted above,
differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical
and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the
working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind
unbelief in the new gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose
the Chartists and the Reformistes.
FOOTNOTES
[1] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: Not the English Restoration
(1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830).
[2] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: This applies chiefly to Germany,
where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large
portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards,
and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers
of potato spirits. The wealthier british aristocracy are, as yet, rather
above that; but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending
their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock companies.
[3] NOTE by Engels to 1888 German edition: The revolutionary storm of 1848
swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the
desire to dabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical type
of this tendency is Mr Karl Gruen.
[4] Francois Noel Babeuf (1760-1797): French political agitator; plotted
unsuccessfully to destroy the Directory in revolutionary France and established
a communistic system.
[5] Comte de Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy (1760-1825): French social
philosopher; generally regarded as founder of French socialism. He thought
society should be reorganized along industrial lines and that scientists
should be the new spiritual leaders. His most important work is Nouveau
Christianisme (1825).
[6] Charles Fourier (1772-1837): French social reformer; propounded a system
of self-sufficient cooperatives known as Fourierism, especially in his work
Le_Nouveau_Monde_industriel_ (1829-30)
[7] Richard Owen (1771-1858): Welsh industrialist and social reformer. He
formed a model industrial community at New Lanark, Scotland, and pioneered
cooperative societies. His books include _New_View_Of_Society_ (1813).
[8] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: "Home Colonies" were
what Owen called his communist model societies. _Phalansteres_ were socialist
colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was
the name given by Caber to his utopia and, later on, to his
American communist colony.
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
* NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: The party then represented
in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc (1811-82), in
the daily press by the _Reforme_. The name of Social-Democracy signifies,
with these its inventors, a section of the Democratic or Republican Party
more or less tinged with socialism.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact
that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic
Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution
as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which
fomented the insurrection of Krakow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary
way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty-bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working
class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between
bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway
use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political
conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its
supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes
in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country
is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out
under more advanced conditions of European civilization and with a much
more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth,
and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution
in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian
revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question
in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development
at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic
parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare
that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing
social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world
to win.
Working men of all countries, unite!
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