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Manifesto
of the Communist Party
1847
INTRO
COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
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 Czar, 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 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.
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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.
CHAPTER
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS.
The
history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles.
Freeman
and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-masters and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and
oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another,
carried on an Uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a
fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of
the contending classes.
In
the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a
complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a
manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have
patricians, knights, plebeians, 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 distinctive feature: it has simplified the 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 sufficed 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 labour
between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face
of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime
the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacture 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 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 its 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 of that
class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal
nobility, it became an armed and self-governing association
in the mediaeval commune: here independent urban republic
(as in Italy and Germany); there, taxable "third
estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in
the period of manufacture proper, serving either the
semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise
against the nobility, and, in fact, corner stone 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 has played a most
revolutionary role in history.
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 bond between man and man than naked self-interest,
than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the
most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous
enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water
of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth
into exchange value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom- Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions,
it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal
exploitation.
The
bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation
hitherto honoured 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 labourers.
The
bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental
veil, and has reduced the family relation to 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 migrations 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 in air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober
senses his real conditions of life and his relations with
his kind.
The
need of a constantly expanding market for its products
chases the bourgeoisie over the whole 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 interdependence 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 nations, even the most barbarian,
into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are
the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese
walls, 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 a 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.
More
and more the bourgeoisie keeps doing away with the scattered
state of the population, of the means of production, and of
property. It has agglomerated population, centralized 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 of 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 labour? We see, then, that the means of
production and of exchange which served as the foundation
for the growth of the bourgeoisie 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 a
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 to it, and by 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 bourgeoisie 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 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 no sooner do
they overcome these fetters than 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 labourers, who
live only so long as they find work, and who find work only
so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers,
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 division of labour,
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 his maintenance and for the
propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and
therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of
production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness
of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in
proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour
increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also
increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by
increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by
increased speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern
industry has converted the little workshop of the
patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial
capitalist. Masses of labourers, 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
overseer, and, above all, by 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
labour- in other words, the more modern industry develops-
the more is the labour 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 labour, more or less expensive to use,
according to their age and sex.
No sooner has the labourer received his wages in cash, for
the moment escaping exploitation by the manufacturer, than
he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie- the
landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The
lower strata of the middle class- the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the
handicraftsmen and peasants- all these sink gradually into
the proletariat, partly because 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 labourers, then by
the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one
trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who
directly exploits them.
They
direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of
production, but against the instruments of production
themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with
their labour, they smash machinery to pieces, they set
factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished
status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At
this stage the labourers 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, still able to do so for a time. 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 bourgeoisie.
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
labour 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 unceasing 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 bourgeoisie; 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 lies not in the immediate
result but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This
union is furthered by the improved means of communication
which are created by modern industry, and which 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, which the
burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways,
required centuries to attain, the modern proletarians,
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 Hour
bill in England was carried.Altogether, collisions between
the classes of the old society further the course of
development of the proletariat in many ways. 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 times with the
bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it
sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask
for its 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
classes 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 process 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 really 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 so
only 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 adopt
that of the proletariat.
The
"dangerous class," the social scum (Lumpenproletariat),
that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers
of 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.
The
social conditions of the old society no longer exist for the
proletariat. The proletarian is without property; his
relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in
common with bourgeois family relations; modern industrial
labour, 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 feudal absolutism,
managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on
the contrary, instead of rising with the progress 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 condition for the existence and sway of the
bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of
capital; the condition for capital is wage labour. Wage
labour rests exclusively on competition between the
labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary
promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the
labourers, due to competition, by their 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.
CHAPTER
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 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 mould 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 line 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
the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat
into a class, overthrow of 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
favour 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’s 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 labour, 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 the 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 modern bourgeois private property? But does wage
labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It
creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits
wage labour and which cannot increase except upon condition
of begetting a new supply of wage labour for fresh
exploitation. Property in its present form is based on the
antagonism of capital and wage labour. 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 a 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 labour. The average price of wage labour is
the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of
subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the
labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore,
the wage labourer appropriates by means of his labour merely
suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no
means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the
products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the
maintenance and reproduction of human life and that leaves
no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All
that we want to do away with is the miserable character of
this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to
increase capital, and is allowed to live only insofar as the
interest of the ruling class requires it.
In
bourgeois society living labour is but a means to increase
accumulated labour. In Communist society accumulated labour
is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence
of the labourer.
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 bourgeoisie 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, of 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 a
word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From
the moment when labour 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 labour of others by means of such
appropriation.
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 of its members
who work acquire nothing, and 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
labour when there is no longer any capital.
All
objections urged against the Communist mode of producing and
appropriating material products have in the same way been
urged against the Communist modes 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 economic 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
springing 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 the
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 will 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 of society, direct or indirect, by means of
schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented 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 parent and child, becomes all
the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern
industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn
asunder and their children transformed into simple articles
of commerce and instruments of labour.
But
you Communists would introduce community of women, screams
the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.
The
bourgeois sees in 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 than 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 community of women; it has existed almost from
time immemorial.
Our
bourgeois, not content with having the 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.
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, community of
women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition
of the present system of production must bring with it the
abolition of the community of women 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 workingmen 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 antagonisms between peoples are vanishing
gradually from day to day, 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 is 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 conceptions- 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 ideas that revolutionize society, they do
but express the 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 18th 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, "religion, moral, philosophical and
juridical ideas have been modified in the course of
historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy,
political science, and law, constantly survived this
change." "There are, besides, eternal truths such
as freedom, justice, etc., that are common to all states of
society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it
abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of
constituting them on a new basis; it, therefore, acts in
contradiction to all past historical experience." What
does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all
past society has consisted in the development of class
antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at
different epochs.
But
whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all
past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by
the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of
past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it
displays, moves within certain common forms, or general
ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total
disappearance of class antagonisms.
The
Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with
traditional property relations; no wonder that its
development involves 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 establish democracy.
The
proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest by
degrees 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 of 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 the 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 right of inheritance.
4.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and
rebels.
5.
Centralization of credit in the hands 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 the distinction
between town and country by a more equable
distribution of the population over the country.
10.
Free education for all children in public schools.
Abolition of child factory labour 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.
CHAPTER
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. 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 its
revenge by singing lampoons against its new master, and
whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming
catastrophe.
In
this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half
lampoon; half 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,
as 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
from 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 bourgeoisie 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 coercive measures against the working class; and in
ordinary life, despite their highfalutin phrases they stoop
to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of
industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic
in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.
As
the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so
has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
Nothing
is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist
tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private
property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not
preached in the place of these, charity and poverty,
celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and
Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water
with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the
aristocrat. b. Petty Bourgeois Socialism The feudal
aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the
bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of
existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern
bourgeois society. The mediaeval 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 as a supplementary part of bourgeois
society.
The
individual members of this class, however, are 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 labour, the concentration of
capital and land in a few hands, over-production and crises;
it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois
and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in
production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of
wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations,
the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family
relations, of the old nationalities.
In
its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires
either to restoring the old means of production and of
exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the
old society, or to cramping the modern means of production
and of exchange within the framework of the old property
relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by
those means. In either case it is both reactionary and
utopian.
Its
last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture;
patriarchal relations in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all
intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of
Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues. 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
expression 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 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 18th 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
phantasy.
This
German Socialism, which took its school-boy task so
seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade
in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its
pedantic innocence.
The fight of the German 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 Socialist 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 theretothe
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 floggings and
bullets, with which these same governments, just at that
time, dosed the risings of the German working class.
While
this "True" Socialism thus served the governments
as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie it at the
same time directly represented a reactionary interest, the
interest of the German Philistines. In Germany the petty
bourgeois class, a relic of the 16th century, and since then
constantly cropping up again under various various forms 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 increase wonderfully 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
his 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.
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 straightway 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 economic 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 productionan abolition that can
be effected 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 labour, 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. These are the last
words and the only seriously meant words of bourgeois
Socialism.
It
is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois are 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 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
St. Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence
in the early undeveloped period described above of the
struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1.
Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The
founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms
as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the
prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in
its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without
any historical initiative or any independent political
movement.
Since
the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the
development of industry, the economic situation, as such
Socialists 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 specially
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 favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to
society at large, without 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, and endeavour by small experiments,
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 writings 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; abolition of the family, of private gain and of the
wage-system; the proclamation of social harmony; the
conversion of the functions of the state into a mere
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 justification. 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, endeavour,
and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to
reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of
experimental realization of their social utopias, of
founding isolated phalansteres, of establishing "Home
Colonies," or setting up a "Little Icaria"-
pocket editions of the New Jerusalem- and to realize all
these castles in the air they are compelled to appeal to the
feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink
into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists
depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic
pedantry and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in
the miraculous effects of their social science. They,
therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part
of the working class; such action, according to them, can
only result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.
The
Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France,
respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.
CHAPTER
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 themselves with the
Social-Democrats against the conservative and radical
bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a
critical position in regard to phrases 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 Cracow 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 what existed in England in the 17th and in
France in the 18th 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 case the property question, no matter what
its degree of development at the time.
Finally,
they labour 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.
Workingmen
of all countries, unite!
THE
END
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