The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Published February 3, 2017 | By admin

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Manifesto
of the Communist Party

1848

Bourgeois and Proletarians

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? One the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the
other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old
ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises,
and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned
against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has
also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working
class — the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion
is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of laborers, who live
only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases
capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every
other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of
competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the
workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most
monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of
production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that
he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a
commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion,
therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more,
in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same
proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working
hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of
machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the
great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory,
are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the
command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the
bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the
machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer
himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more
petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words,
the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by
that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity
for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use,
according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end,
that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the
bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and
retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually
into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the
scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the
large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new
methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the
population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its
struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first, the contest is carried on by individual laborers,
then by the work of people of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one
locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their
attacks not against the bourgeois condition of production, but against the instruments of
production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labor, they
smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the
vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole
country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more
compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the
union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is
compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to
do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the
enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the
non-industrial bourgeois, 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 he hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the
bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in
accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all
the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace
over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory
labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all
production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation,
the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called,
is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat
during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to
organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling
class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will,
along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class
antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as
a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall
have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all.

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 those attainment was the object of
the pending struggle in Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country
squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening
bourgeoisie.

It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with which these
same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings.

View Part II of the Communist Manifesto

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