There is a lot of controversy swirling around the Democratic Platform, the changes Hillary Clinton made to appease the Bernie Sanders legions, and what she really intends to do about it if elected. The liberal media, Bernie and Hillary among others refer to the platform as the "Revolutionary" movement of the Democrats as if that means she will abandon her Wall Street base.
To date Clinton has effectively compromised Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, two people who really were a threat to Wall Street and the one percent control. In the end both withered under the pressure from Hillary and had to endorse her. Yet, there is a lingering doubt as to whether Hillary can be trusted to move forward with Wall Street reforms when she herself is the epitome of the one percent control of the nation.
So just where does the Progressive platform originate and what influences are causing such an uproar in the Democratic party? Some say there is a strong socialist-communist influence. Bernie was a socia.ist before becoming a Democrat. Many nations in Europe have taken the socialist approach and suffered greatly.
Ironically communism was called a socialist revolutionary movement once upon a time so to give you a chance to judge for yourself the level of influence, here is something the liberal media will never give you, a source document for socialism.
The following is the Communist Manifesto as written in 1848 by fellow Germans the father of the Communist movement, Karl Marx, and his good friend Frederick Engels. You see if there are parallels one hundred and sixty-eight years later with the Democratic Revolution of today.
Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels
Manifesto of the Communist
Party
1848
A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe
have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: 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 specter of
communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of
various nationalities have assembled in London
I -- BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician
and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor
and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either
in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of
the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of
history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into
various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights,
plebeians, and 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
colonization 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
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: 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 people than naked
self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly
ecstasies 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, and 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, and 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 barbarians,
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 to use, according to their age and sex.
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, and 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 places 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, and 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
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 they're 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
gravediggers. Its fall and the victory
of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
By proletariat, the class of
modern wage laborers whom, 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]
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 also 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, and 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 of 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 workers 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 juridical ideas have
been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political
science, and law, constantly survived this change."
"There are, besides,
eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states
of society. But communism abolishes eternal
truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting
them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical
experience."
What does this accusation
reduce itself to? The history of all
past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms
that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may
have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one
part of society by the other. No wonder,
then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity
and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas,
which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class
antagonisms.
The communist revolution is
the most radical rupture with traditional 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.
6. Centralization of the
means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories
and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation
of wastelands, 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.
III -- 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
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 prophecies 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.
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 its positive aims,
however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of
production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the
old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange
within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were
bound to be, exploded by those means. In
either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Its last words are:
corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn
historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this
form of socialism ended in a miserable 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
German philosophers,
would-be philosophers, and beaux espirits (men of letters), eagerly seized on
this literature, only forgetting that when these writings emigrated from France into Germany
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
whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany
To the absolute governments,
with there 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, doused 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
To preserve this class is to
preserve the existing state of things in Germany
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
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 & COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that
literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to
the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of
the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement,
when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then
undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic
conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and
could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied
these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary
character. It inculcated universal
asceticism and social leveling in its crudest form.
The socialist and communist
systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and others,
spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the
struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and
Proletarians).
The founders of these systems
see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing
elements in the prevailing form of society.
But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle
of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political
movement.
Since the development of
class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic
situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material
conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social
science, after new social laws that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to
yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of
emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class 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" -- 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
IV -- 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
In Switzerland
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
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.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
PREFACE TO 1872 GERMAN EDITION
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 London Germany ,
England , and America London ,
translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and in 1871 in at least three different
translations in America Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848, and
recently in "Le Socialiste" of New
York London
shortly after it was first published in Germany Geneva
However much that the 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."
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
FREDERICK ENGELS
June 24, 1872
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 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 America
And now Russia 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
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
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 of Europe and America owes more than to any one else -- rests
at Highgate Cemetery
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 primeval 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
solely 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 England
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
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 Paris London
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 elbowroom, 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
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 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 workshops 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 New York New
York 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 Copenhagen , 1885; a fresh
French translation in "Le Socialiste", Paris Madrid
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
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, the 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 England Brussels
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
Association" 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
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
"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 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 America
"And now Russia 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
"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
Additional Notes
At about the same date, a
new Polish version appeared in Geneva Copenhagen
A new French version
appeared in 1886, in "Le Socialiste" of Paris Madrid ,
and then reissued in pamphlet form: "Manifesto del Partido
Communista" por Carlos Marx y F. Engels ,
Madrid
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 London 185 Fleet Street
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
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
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
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
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 decidedly 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 occurred 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
NOTES ON THE MANIFESTO & TRANSLATIONS OF IT
The Communist Manifesto was
first published in February 1848 in London Moore
