A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre ofcommunism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy allianceto exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, FrenchRadicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communisticby its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurledback the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced oppositionparties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itselfa power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the faceof the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies,and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifestoof the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in Londonand sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French,German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians(1)
[German Original]
The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lordand serf, guild-master(3) andjourneyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant oppositionto one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitutionof society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicatedarrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of socialrank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; inthe 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 feudalsociety has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but establishednew classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in placeof the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctfeature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is moreand more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classesdirectly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers ofthe earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisiewere developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up freshground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets,the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in themeans of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation,to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionaryelement in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolisedby closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the newmarkets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters werepushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour betweenthe different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labourin each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Evenmanufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionisedindustrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant,Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrialmillionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discoveryof America paved the way. This market has given an immense developmentto commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This developmenthas, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion asindustry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportionthe bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the backgroundevery class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the productof a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modesof production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisiewas accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. Anoppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governingassociation in the medieval commune(4):here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable“third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the periodof manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolutemonarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstoneof the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, sincethe establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conqueredfor itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the commonaffairs 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 endto all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunderthe motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and hasleft remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, thancallous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasiesof religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism,in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worthinto exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible charteredfreedoms, 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 honouredand looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, thelawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimentalveil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutaldisplay of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire,found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has beenthe first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplishedwonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals;it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exodusesof nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionisingthe instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production,and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modesof production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first conditionof existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionisingof production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlastinguncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlierones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient andvenerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed onesbecome antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts intoair, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to facewith sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chasesthe bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world marketgiven a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feetof industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-establishednational industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. Theyare dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life anddeath question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longerwork up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotestzones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but inevery quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by theproduction of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfactionthe products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local andnational seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction,universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectualproduction. The intellectual creations of individual nations become commonproperty. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more andmore 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 themost barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commoditiesare the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intenselyobstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, onpain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compelsthem to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., tobecome bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after itsown image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns.It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban populationas compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part ofthe population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the countrydependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countriesdependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois,the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered stateof the population, of the means of production, and of property. It hasagglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentratedproperty in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was politicalcentralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separateinterests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped togetherinto 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 haveall 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 continentsfor cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured outof the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that suchproductive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whosefoundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society.At a certain stage in the development of these means of production andof exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged,the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in oneword, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible withthe already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. Theyhad to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social andpolitical constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political swayof the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeoissociety, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property,a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and ofexchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powersof the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decadepast the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revoltof modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, againstthe property relations that are the conditions for the existence of thebourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crisesthat by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeoissociety on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, agreat part not only of the existing products, but also of the previouslycreated productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises,there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemedan absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly findsitself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if afamine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of everymeans of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why?Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence,too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposalof society no longer tend to further the development of the conditionsof bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful forthese conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcomethese fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society,endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeoissociety are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And howdoes the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforceddestruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquestof 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 destructivecrises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to theground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bringdeath to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wieldthose weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed,in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed— a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and whofind work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers,who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other articleof 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 oflabour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character,and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage ofthe machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and mosteasily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of productionof a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistencethat he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal toits cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsivenessof the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportionas the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportionthe burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the workinghours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increasedspeed of machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchalmaster into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers,crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of theindustrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchyof officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class,and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturerhimself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end andaim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manuallabour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, themore is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of ageand sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the workingclass. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, accordingto their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer,so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set uponby the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper,the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople,shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants— all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because theirdiminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industryis carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists,partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methodsof production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of thepopulation.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. Withits birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contestis carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory,then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individualbourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not againstthe bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of productionthemselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour,they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek torestore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scatteredover the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywherethey unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequenceof 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 wholeproletariat 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, thelandowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, thewhole 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 increasesin number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows,and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions oflife within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, inproportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearlyeverywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competitionamong the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wagesof 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 takemore and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon,the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois;they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanentassociations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasionalrevolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time.The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but inthe ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by theimproved means of communication that are created by modern industry, andthat place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous localstruggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle betweenclasses. 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, achievein a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequentlyinto a political party, is continually being upset again by the competitionbetween the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer,mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests ofthe workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisieitself. 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 bourgeoisiefinds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy;later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interestshave become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time withthe bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itselfcompelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to dragit into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, suppliesthe proletariat with its own elements of political and general education,in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fightingthe bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classare, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, orare at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supplythe proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, theprogress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact withinthe whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character,that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joinsthe revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility wentover to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes overto the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists,who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoreticallythe historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today,the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classesdecay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariatis its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, theartisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to savefrom extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. Theyare therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they arereactionary, 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 transferinto the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their futureinterests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at thatof the proletariat.
The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat]the social scum, that passively rotting massthrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there,be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditionsof life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool ofreactionary intrigue.
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large arealready virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relationto his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeoisfamily relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital,the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has strippedhim of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, areto him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just asmany bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortifytheir already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditionsof appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productiveforces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation,and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They havenothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroyall previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or inthe interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immensemajority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannotstir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata ofofficial society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariatwith the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat ofeach country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its ownbourgeoisie.
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 wherethe violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the swayof 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 tooppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which itcan, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the periodof serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the pettybourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to developinto a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of risingwith the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditionsof existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism developsmore rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, thatthe bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society,and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-ridinglaw. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existenceto its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sinkinto 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, itsexistence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeoisclass is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capitalis wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between thelabourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie,replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionarycombination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore,cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie producesand appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, aboveall, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariatare equally inevitable.
Chapter 2: Proletarians and Communists
1.By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of themeans of social production and employers of wage labour.
By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, havingno means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labourpower in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
2.That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society,the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all butunknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered commonownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be thesocial foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and,by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitiveform of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisationof this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form,by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1881) crowning discovery of the true natureof the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of theprimeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separateand finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolutionin The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]
3.Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not ahead of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]
4.This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italyand France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rightsof self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition]
“Commune” was the name taken in France by the nascent towns evenbefore they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-governmentand political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for theeconomical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as thetypical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]
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