Manifesto of
the Communist Party
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
1848
1 Bourgeois and Proletarians
2 Proletarians and Communists
3 Socialist and Communist Literature
4 Position of the Communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties
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
colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the
means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to
navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to
the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid
development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was
monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants
of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The
guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class;
division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the
face of division of labor in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken
by the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY; the place of the industrial middle class
by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies,
the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery
of America 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 trades people,
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
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