Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels
Manifesto
of the Communist Party
1848
A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre
of communism. All the powers of old Europe
have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar,
Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by
its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the
branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties,
as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a
power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole
world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery
tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following
manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and
Danish languages.
I -- BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS [1]
The history of all hitherto existing society [2]
is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and
serf, guild-master [3]
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open
fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution
of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated
arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social
rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the
Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,
serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new
classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the
old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct
feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and
more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly
facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the
earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were
developed.
The discovery of America,
the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh
ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the
colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of
exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to
industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was
monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of
the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters
were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between
the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in
each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers
no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial
production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY;
the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the
leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of
America
paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to
navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on
the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation,
railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased
its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the
Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a
long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of
production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was
accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed
class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing
association of medieval commune [4]:
here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable
"third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward, in the
period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute
monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of
the great monarchies in general -- the bourgeoisie has at last, since the
establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself,
in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of
the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the
whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the
motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has
left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous
"cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of
religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in
the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into
exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms,
has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted
naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored
and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer,
the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has
reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of
vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting
complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what
man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing
Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted
expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of
production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the
great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry
the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries
have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new
industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all
civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw
material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose
products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In
place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and
climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,
we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual
creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness
and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous
national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,
by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most
barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the
heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred
of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to
adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it
calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In
one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has
created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared
with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from
the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the
towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the
civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the
West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of
the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has
agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has
concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was
political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with
separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped
together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national
class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created
more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery,
application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation,
railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation,
canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what
earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered
in the lap of social labor?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation
the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain
stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the
conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal
organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal
relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed
productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder;
they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of
the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois
society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a
society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange,
is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether
world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history
of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive
forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations
that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It
is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return,
put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more
threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products,
but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically
destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier
epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it
appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply
of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And
why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too
much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of
society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of
bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these
conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these
fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too
narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get
over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of
productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the
more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way
for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means
whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are
now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those
weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same
proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class
of 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, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical
movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so
obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in
number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it
feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within
the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as
machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces
wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and
the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more
fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly
developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions
between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the
character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to
form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in
order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order
to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the
contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit
of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding
union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of
communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers
of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact
that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same
character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle
is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the
Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern
proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into
a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between
the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.
It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by
taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the
Ten-Hours Bill in England
was carried.
Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in
many ways the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds
itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on,
with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become
antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of
foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to
the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus to drag it into the political arena.
The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own
elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat
with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are,
by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least
threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat
with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the
progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the
whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a
small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the
revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as,
therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the
bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat,
and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised
themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement
as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the
proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay
and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its
special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan,
the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction
their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not
revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try
to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they
are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus
defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own
standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting
mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there,
be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life,
however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue.
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are
already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to
his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois
family relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the same
in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every
trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many
bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois
interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already
acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of
appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces
of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and
thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of
their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous
securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the
interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense
majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot
stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of
official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with
the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each
country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat,
we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up
to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the
violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the
proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on
the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a
class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least,
continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised
himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the
yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern
laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks
deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He
becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and
wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to
be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon
society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to
assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help
letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being
fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words,
its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois
class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital
is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the
laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the
revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern
Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the
bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.
FOOTNOTES
[1]
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of
social production and employers of wage labor.
By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of
production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to
live. [Note by Engels - 1888 English edition]
[2]
That is, all _written_ history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social
organization existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since
then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be
the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by
and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive
form of society everywhere from India
to Ireland.
The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in
its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the
true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of
the primeaval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate
and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution
in _Der Ursprung der
Familie, des Privateigenthumus und des Staats_, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels,
1888 English edition]
[3]
Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of
a guild. [Engels: 1888 English edition]
[4]
This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or
conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords.
[Engels: 1890 German edition]
"Commune" was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even
before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local
self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally
speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country,
for its political development, France.
[Engels: 1888 English edition]
II -- PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The
Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class
parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a
whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape
and mold the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by
this only:
(1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different
countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the
entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.
(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working
class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere
represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most
advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country,
that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically,
they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly
understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general
results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other
proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of
the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas
or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be
universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an
existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very
eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive
feature of communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to
historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of
bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property
generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois
private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of
producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the
exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single
sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right
of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which
property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and
independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of
petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the
bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry
has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It
creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and
which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage
labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the
antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of this
antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social
STATUS in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united
action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of
all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the
property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby
transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the
property that is changed. It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage labor.
The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of
the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in
bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by
means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence.
We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of
labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of
human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of
others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this
appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is
allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labor is but
a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society, accumulated labor
is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past
dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In
bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the
living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things
is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly
so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and
bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present
bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free
selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying,
and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeois about freedom in
general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and
buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when
opposed to the communist abolition of buying and selling, or the bourgeois
conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do
away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is
already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the
few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You
reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the
necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property
for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with
intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we
intend.
From the moment when labor can no longer
be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being
monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be
transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say,
individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual"
you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of
property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made
impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to
appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the
power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the
abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will
overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought
long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those who acquire
anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of
the tautology: There can no longer be any wage labor when there is no longer
any capital.
All objections urged against the
communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the
same way, been urged against the communistic mode of producing and
appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the bourgeois, the
disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so
the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance
of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he
laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you
apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your
bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the
outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois
property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a
law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by
the economical conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you
to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason the social forms
stringing from your present mode of production and form of property --
historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production --
this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.
What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the
case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of
your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most
radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family,
the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely
developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state
of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among
proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a
matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the
vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the
exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed
of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also
social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the
intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The
Communists have not intended the intervention of society in education; they do
but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education
from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois claptrap about the family
and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all
the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family
ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed
into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.
But you Communists would introduce
community 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 juridicial ideas have been modified
in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy,
political science, and law, constantly survived this change."
"There are, besides, eternal truths,
such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But
communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all
morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in
contradiction to all past historical experience."
What does this accusation reduce itself
to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class
antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one
fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society
by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages,
despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain
common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the
total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The communist revolution is the most
radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development
involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois
objections to communism.
We have seen above that the first step in
the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position
of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political
supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize
all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the
proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive
forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot
be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and
on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore,
which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course
of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old
social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the
mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be
different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries,
the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and
application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income
tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all
emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks
of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive
monopoly.
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 waste lands,
and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work.
Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with
manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town
and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in
public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form.
Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
When, in the course of development, class
distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the
hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its
political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the
organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during
its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances,
to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself
the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of
production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the
conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and
will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society,
with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which
the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
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
to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution
of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again
succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was
altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But
even in the domain of literature, the old cries of the restoration period had
become impossible. [1]
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight,
apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the
bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the
aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and
whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an
echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and
incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but
always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the
march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian
alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw
on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and
irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England"
exhibited this spectacle:
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the
bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and
conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing
that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that
the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their
criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this:
that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed which is destined to
cut up, root and branch, the old order of society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a
proletariat as that it creates a _revolutionary_ proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all
corrective measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite
their high falutin' phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped
from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honor, for traffic in
wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. [2]
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has clerical
socialism with feudal socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge. Has
not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against
the state? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty,
celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church?
Christian socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the
heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
b. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the
bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and
perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses
and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern
bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially
and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising
bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new
class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and
bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself a supplementary part of bourgeois
society. The individual members of this class, however, as being constantly
hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as Modern
Industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will
completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be
replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs
and shopmen.
In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half
of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat
against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime,
the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of
these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class.
Thus arose petty-bourgeois socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not
only in France but also in England.
This school of socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions
in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies
of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery
and division of labor; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands;
overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty
bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in
production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the
industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral
bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
In it positive aims, however, this form of socialism aspires either to
restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old
property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of
production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations
that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case,
it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations
in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating
effects of self-deception, this form of socialism ended in a miserable
hangover.
c. German or "True"
Socialism
The socialist and communist literature of France,
a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and
that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced
into Germany
at a time when the bourgeoisie in that country had just begun its contest with
feudal absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of
letters), eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when these
writings immigrated from France
into Germany,
French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with
German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate
practical significance and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the
German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first French
Revolution were nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason"
in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French
bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure will, of will as it was
bound to be, of true human will generally.
The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French
ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in
annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of
view.
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated,
namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic saints _over_
the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been
written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French
literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French
original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions
of money, they wrote "alienation of humanity", and beneath the French
criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote "dethronement of the category
of the general", and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French
historical criticisms, they dubbed "Philosophy of Action", "True
Socialism", "German Science of Socialism", "Philosophical
Foundation of Socialism", and so on.
The French socialist and communist literature was thus completely
emasculated. And, since it ceased, in the hands of the German, to express the
struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome
"French one-sidedness" and of representing, not true requirements,
but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the
interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no
reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and
solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion,
meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal
movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to "True"
Socialism of confronting the political movement with the socialistic demands,
of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative
government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press,
bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the
masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois
movement. German socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French
criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern
bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and
the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment
was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors,
country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the
threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with
which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class
risings.
While this "True" Socialism thus served the government as a weapon
for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented
a reactionary interest, the interest of German philistines. In Germany, the
petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then
constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social basis
of the existing state of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The
industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain
destruction -- on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the
other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism
appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric,
steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the
German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths", all skin and
bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a
public. And on its part German socialism recognized, more and more, its own
calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model
nation, and the German petty philistine to be the typical man. To every
villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic
interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the
extreme length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive"
tendency of communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of
all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called socialist and communist
publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of
this foul and enervating literature. [3]
2.
CONSERVATIVE OR BOURGEOIS SOCIALISM
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in
order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers
of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of
societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics,
hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has,
moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty as an example of this
form.
The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social
conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom.
They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating
elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie
naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and
bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or
less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system,
and thereby to march straightaway into the social New Jerusalem, it but
requires in reality that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of
existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the
bourgeoisie.
A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism
sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working
class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the
material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any
advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this
form of socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois
relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a
revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of
these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations
between capital and labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the
administrative work of bourgeois government.
Bourgeois socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it
becomes a mere figure of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the
benefit of the working class. Prison reform: for the benefit of the working
class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois
socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois -- for the
benefit of the working class.
3.
CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in
every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the
proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf [4]
and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in
times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown,
necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as
well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation,
conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending
bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these
first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It
inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
The socialist and communist systems, properly so
called, those of Saint-Simon [5],
Fourier [6],
Owen [7],
and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described
above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1.
Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as
the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But
the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class
without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.
Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the
development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as
yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the
proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social
laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action;
historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the
gradual, spontaneous class organization of the proletariat to an organization
of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves
itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of
their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for
the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only
from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat
exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own
surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far
superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every
member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal
to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to
the ruling class. For how can people when once they understand their system,
fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action;
they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to
failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social
gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the
proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic
conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings
of that class for a general reconstruction of society.
But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical
element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full
of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The
practical measures proposed in them -- such as the abolition of the distinction
between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for
the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of
social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more superintendence
of production -- all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class
antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in
these publications, are recognized in their earliest indistinct and undefined
forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian character.
The significance of critical-utopian socialism and
communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as
the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic
standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all
practical value and all theoretical justifications. Therefore, although the
originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their
disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by
the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive
historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavor, and that
consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class
antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social
utopias, of founding isolated phalansteres, of establishing "Home
Colonies", or setting up a "Little Icaria" [8]
-- pocket editions of the New Jerusalem -- and to realize all these castles in
the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the
bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary
conservative socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more
systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the
miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the
working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind
unbelief in the new gospel.
The Owenites in England,
and the Fourierists in France,
respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.
FOOTNOTES
[1]
NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: Not the English Restoration
(1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830).
[2]
NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: This applies chiefly to Germany, where
the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates
cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive
beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier
british aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to
make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less
shady joint-stock companies.
[3]
NOTE by Engels to 1888 German edition: The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept
away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to
dabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical type of this
tendency is Mr Karl Gruen.
[4]
Francois Noel Babeuf (1760-1797): French political agitator; plotted
unsuccessfully to destroy the Directory in revolutionary France and
established a communistic system.
[5]
Comte de Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy (1760-1825): French social
philosopher; generally regarded as founder of French socialism. He thought
society should be reorganized along industrial lines and that scientists should
be the new spiritual leaders. His most important work is _Nouveau_Christianisme_
(1825).
[6]
Charles Fourier (1772-1837): French social reformer; propounded a system of
self-sufficient cooperatives known as Fourierism, especially in his work
_Le_Nouveau_Monde_industriel_ (1829-30)
[7]
Robert Owen (1771-1858): Welsh industrialist and social reformer. He formed a
model industrial community at New Lanark, Scotland, and pioneered cooperative
societies. His books include _New_View_Of_Society_ (1813).
[8]
NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: "Home Colonies" were what
Owen called his communist model societies. _Phalansteres_ were socialist
colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria
was the name given by Caber to his utopia and, later on, to his American
communist colony.
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, the Communists ally with the Social
Democrats*
against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right
to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally
handed down from the Great Revolution.
In Switzerland,
they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party
consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the
French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support
the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for
national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Krakow in 1846.
In Germany,
they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against
the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty-bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working
class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between
bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway
use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political
conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its
supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in
Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country
is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under
more advanced conditions of European civilization and with a much more
developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France
in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will
be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in
each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the
time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic
parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare
that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing
social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to
win.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
FOOTNOTES
*
NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: The party then represented in
Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc (1811-82), in the
daily press by the Reforme. The name of Social-Democracy signifies, with
these its inventors, a section of the Democratic or Republican Party more or
less tinged with socialism.
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 in November 1847, to write for
publication a detailed theoretical and practical programme for the Party. Such
was the origin of the following Manifesto, the manuscript of which travelled to
London to be
printed a few weeks before the February Revolution. First published in German,
it has been republished in that language in at least twelve different editions
in Germany, England, and America. It was published in
English for the first time in 1850 in the _Red Republican_, London,
translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and in 1871 in at least three different
translations in America.
The french version first appeared in Paris
shortly before the June insurrection of 1848, and recently in _Le Socialiste_
of New York. A new translation is in the course of preparation. A Polish
version appeared in London shortly after it was
first published in Germany.
A Russian translation was published in Geneva
in the 'sixties. Into Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its
appearance.
However much that state of things may have altered during the last
twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on
the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be
improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the
Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions
for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on
the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage
would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the
gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying
improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the
practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still
more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held
political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been
antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that
"the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery,
and wield it for its own purposes." (See The
Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International
Working Men's Assocation, 1871, where this point is further developed.)
Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is
deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847;
also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various
opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in
practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely
changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater
portion of the political parties there enumerated.
But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no
longer any right to alter. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with an
introduction bridging the gap from 1847 to the present day; but this reprint
was too unexpected to leave us time for that.
KARL MARX
FREDERICK ENGELS
June 24, 1872
London
London
PREFACE TO 1882 RUSSIAN EDITION
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,
translated by Bakunin, was published early in the 'sixties by the printing
office of the Kolokol. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of
the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible
today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time
(December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position of the
Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various countries.
Precisely Russia and the United States
are missing here. It was the time when Russia
constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian
forces of Europe through immigration. Both
countries provided Europe with raw materials
and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products.
Bother were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing European
system.
How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North
American for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking
the very foundations of European landed property -- large and small. At the
same time, it enabled the United States
to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale
that must shortly break the industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and
especially of England,
existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself.
Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of
the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant
farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous
concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the
industrial regions.
And now Russia!
During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the
European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat
just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the
chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in
Gatchina, and Russia forms
the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the
inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find,
face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property,
just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the
peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly
undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership of land, pass directly to
the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it
first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the
historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution
becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both
complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve
as the starting point for a communist development.
KARL MARX
FREDERICK ENGELS January 21, 1882
London
London
PREFACE TO 1883 GERMAN EDITION
The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man
to whom the whole working class class of Europe and America owes more than to
any one else -- rests at Highgate Cemetary and over his grave the first first
grass is already growing. Since his death [March 13, 1883], there can be even
less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But I consider it all
the more necessary again to state the following expressly:
The basic thought running through the Manifesto -- that economic production,
and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising
therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history
of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primaeval
communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles,
of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating
classes at various stages of social evolution; that this struggle, however, has
now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat)
can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it
(the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of
society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles -- this basic thought
belongs soley and exclusively to Marx.
[ENGELS FOOTNOTE TO PARAGRAPH: "This proposition", I wrote in the
preface to the English translation, "which, in my opinion, is destined to
do for history what Darwin's
theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for
some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it is
best shown by my _Conditions of the Working Class in England_. But when I again
met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it
before me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it
here."]
I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary
that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.
FREDERICK ENGELS
June 28, 1883
London
London
PREFACE TO 1888 ENGLISH EDITION
The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a
working men's association, first exclusively German, later on international,
and under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a
secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in November 1847, Marx and
Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete theoretical and practical party
programme. Drawn up in German, in January 1848, the manuscript was sent to the
printer in London
a few weeks before the French Revolution of February 24. A French translation
was brought out in Paris
shortly before the insurrection of June 1848. The first English translation, by
Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney's _Red Republican_, London, 1850. A Danish
and a Polish edition had also been published.
The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 -- the first great
battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie -- drove again into the background,
for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class.
Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was, again, as it had been before the
Revolution of February, solely between different sections of the propertied class;
the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the
position of extreme wing of the middle-class Radicals. Wherever independent
proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly
hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the
Communist League, then located in Cologne.
The members were arrested and, after eighteen months' imprisonment, they were
tried in October 1852. This selebrated "Cologne Communist Trial"
lasted from October 4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were sentenced
to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years.
Immediately after the sentence, the League was formlly dissolved by the
remaining members. As to the Manifesto, it seemed henceforth doomed to
oblivion.
When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for another
attack on the ruling classes, the International Working Men's Association
sprang up. But this association, formed with the express aim of welding into
one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could
not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto. The
International was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to
the English trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium,
Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans in Germany.
[ENGEL'S FOOTNOTE: Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself
to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto.
But in his first public agitation, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond demanding
co-operative worhsops supported by state credit.]
Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties,
entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was
sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and
vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the
victories, could not help bringing home to men's minds the insufficiency of
their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete
insight into the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was
right. The International, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite
different men from what it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France,
Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative English
trade unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with
the International, were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year
at Swansea, their president could say in their name: "Continental
socialism has lost its terror for us." In fact, the principles of the
Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of all countries.
The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since 1850, the German
text had been reprinted several times in Switzerland,
England, and America. In
1872, it was translated into English in New
York, where the translation was published in
_Woorhull and Claflin's Weekly_. From this English version, a French one was
made in _Le Socialiste_ of New York. Since then, at least two more English
translations, moer or less mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in England. The
first Russian translation, made by Bakunin, was published at Herzen's Kolokol
office in Geneva, about 1863; a second one, by
the heroic Vera Zasulich, also in Geneva,
in 1882. A new Danish edition is to be found in _Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek_,
Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation in
_Le Socialiste_, Paris,
1886. From this latter, a Spanish version was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German
reprints are not to be counted; there have been twelve altogether at the least.
An Armenian translation, which was to be published in Constantinople some
months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid
of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator
declined to call it his own production. Of further translations into other languages
I have heard but had not seen. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects the
history of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the
most wide spread, the most international production of all socialist
literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men from
Siberia to California.
Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a _socialist_
manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the
adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in
France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and
gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks
who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to
capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside
the working-class movement, and looking rather to the "educated"
classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced
of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the
necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a crude,
rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the
cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the
Utopian communism of Cabet in France,
and of Weitling in Germany.
Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class
movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, "respectable";
communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning,
was that "the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working
class itself," there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we
must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.
The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state
that the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus belongs to Marx. That
proposition is: That in every historical epoch, th prevailing mode of economic
production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from
it, form the basis upon which it is built up, and from that which alone can be
explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that
consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive
tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class
struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed
classes; That the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions
in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed
class -- the proletariat -- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the
exploiting and ruling class -- the bourgeoisie -- without, at the same time, and
once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation,
oppression, class distinction, and class struggles.
This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done
for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years
before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by
my _Conditions of the Working Class in England_. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845,
he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms almost as clear as
those in which I have stated it here.
From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the following:
"However much that state of things may have altered during the last
twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on
the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be
improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the
Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical
conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress
is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That
passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of
the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying
improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the
practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still
more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held
political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been
antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that
"the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery,
and wield it for its own purposes." (See _The Civil War in France: Address
of the General Council of the International Working Men's Assocation_ 1871,
where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the
criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time,
because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of
the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in
principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political
situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from
off the Earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.
"But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have
no longer any right to alter."
The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater
portion of Marx's _Capital_. We have revised it in common, and I have added a
few notes explanatory of historical allusions.
FREDERICK ENGELS
January 30, 1888
London
London
PREFACE TO 1890 GERMAN EDITION
Since [the 1883 German edition preface] was written, a new German edition of
the Manifesto has again become necessary, and much has also happened to the
Manifesto which should be recorded here.
A second Russian translation -- by Vera Zasulich -- appeared in Geneva in 1882; the
preface to that edition was written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately, the
original German manuscript has gone astray; I must therefore retranslate from
the Russian which will in no way improve the text. It reads:
"The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,
translated by Bakunin, was published early in the 'sixties by the printing
office of the Kolokol. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of
the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible
today.
"What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time
(December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position of the
Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various countries.
Precisely Russia and the United States
are missing here. It was the time when Russia
constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian
forces of Europe through immigration. Both
countries provided Europe with raw materials
and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products. Both
were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing European
system.
"How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North
American for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking
the very foundations of European landed property -- large and small. At the
same time, it enabled the United States
to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale
that must shortly break the industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and
especially of England,
existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself.
Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of
the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant
farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration
of capital funds are developing for the first time in the industrial regions.
"And now Russia!
During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the
European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just
beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief
of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in
Gatchina, and Russia forms
the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.
"The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the
inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find,
face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois
property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by
the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly
undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership of land, pass directly to
the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it
first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the
historical evolution of the West?
"The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian
Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that
both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may
serve as the starting point for a communist development.
"January 21, 1882 London"
At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: _Manifest Kommunistyczny_.
Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the _Socialdemokratisk
Bibliothek_, Copenhagen,
1885. Unfortunately, it is not quite complete; certain essential passages,
which seem to have presented difficulties to the translator, have been omitted,
and, in addition, there are saigns of carelessness here and there, which are
all the more unpleasantly conspicuous since the translation indicates that had
the translator taken a little more pains, he would have done an excellent piece
of work.
A new French version appeared in 1886, in _Le Socialiste_ of Paris; it is
the best published to date.
From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in _El
Socialista_ of Madrid, and then reissued in pamphlet form: _Manifesto del
Partido Communista_ por Carlos Marx y F. Engels,
Madrid, Administracion de El
Socialista, Hernan Cortes 8.
As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the manuscript of an
Armenian translation was offered to a publisher in Constantinople.
But the good man did not have the courage to publish something bearing the name
of Marx and suggested that the translator set down his own name as author,
which the latter however declined.
After one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate American
translations had been repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version at
last appeared in 1888. This was my friend Samuel Moore, and we went through it
together once more before it went to press. It is entitled: _Manifesto of the
Communist_Party_, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorized English
translation, edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet Street, E.C. I have added some
of the notes of that edition to the present one.
The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with enthusiasm, at the
time of its appearance, by the not at all numerous vanguard of scientific
socialism (as is proved by the translations mentioned in the first place), it
was soon forced into the background by the reaction that began with the defeat
of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally excommunicated "by
law" in the conviction of the Cologne Communists in November 1852. With
the disappearance from the public scene of the workers' movement that had begun
with the February Revolution, the Manifesto too passed into the background.
When the European workers had again gathered sufficient strength for a new
onslaught upon the power of the ruling classes, the International Working Men's
Association came into being. Its aim was to weld together into _one_ huge army
the whole militant working class of Europe and America. Therefore it could not
_set out_ from the principles laid down in the Manifesto. It was bound to have
a programme which would not shut the door on the English trade unions, the
French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish Proudhonists, and the German Lassalleans.
This programme -- the considerations underlying the Statutes of the
International -- was drawn up by Marx with a master hand acknowledged even by
the Bakunin and the anarchists. For the ultimate final triumph of the ideas set
forth in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon the intellectual development of
the working class, as it necessarily has to ensue from united action and
discussion. The events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the
defeats even more than the successes, could not but demonstrate to the fighters
the inadequacy of their former universal panaceas, and make their minds more
receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for working-class
emancipation. And Marx was right. The working class of 1874, at the dissolution
of the International, was altogether different from that of 1864, at its
foundation. Proudhonism in the Latin countries, and the specific Lassalleanism
in Germany,
were dying out; and even the ten arch-conservative English trade unions were
gradually approaching the point where, in 1887, the chairman of their Swansea
Congress could say in their name: "Continental socialism has lost its
terror for us." Yet by 1887 continental socialism was almost exclusively
the theory heralded in the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent, the history of
the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement since
1848. At present, it is doubtless the most widely circulated, the most
international product of all socialist literature, the common programme of many
millions of workers of all countries from Siberia to California.
Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a _socialist_
manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were considered socialists. On the one
hand were the adherents of the various utopian systems, notably the Owenites in
England and the Fourierists
in France,
both of whom, at that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying
out. On the other, the manifold types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate
social abuses through their various universal panaceas and all kinds of
patch-work, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases,
people who stood outside the labor movement and who looked for support rather
to the "educated" classes. The section of the working class, however,
which demanded a radical reconstruction of society, convinced that mere
political revolutions were not enough, then called itself _Communist_. It was
still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude communism.
Yet, it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of utopian
communism -- in France, the "Icarian" communists of Cabet, and in Germany that of
Weitling. Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism a
working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite
respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And since we were very
decidely of the opinion as early as then that "the emancipation of the
workers must be the task of the working class itself," we could have no
hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor has it ever
occured to us to repudiate it.
"Working men of all countries, unite!" But few voices responded
when we proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the
first Paris Revolution in which the proletariat came out with the demands of
its own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of most of the
Western European countries joined hands in the International Working Men's
Association of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived only nine
years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created
by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness
than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American
proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time,
mobilized as _one_ army, under _one_ flag, for _one_ immediate aim: the
standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as
proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by
the Paris Workers' Congress of 1889. And today's spectacle will open the eyes
of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the
proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!
FREDERICK ENGELS
May 1, 1890
London
London
NOTES ON THE MANIFESTO AND TRANSLATIONS OF IT
The Communist Manifesto was first published in February 1848 in London. It was written by
Marx and Engels for the Communist League, an organisation of German emigre
workers living in several western European countries. The translation above
follows that of the authorised English translation by Samuel Moore of 1888. In
a few places, notably the concluding line 'Proletarians of all countries,
unite!', Hal Draper's 1994 translation has been followed, rather than Moore's,
which reads 'Working men of all countries unite!' For an exceptionally thorough
account of the background of the Manifesto, the history of different
editions and translations, see Hal Draper The Adventures of the Communist
Manifesto Centre for Socialist History, Berkeley 1994.
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