The Communist Manifesto

25 Pages·2010·0.351 MB·English

by  Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 1
The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
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Title: The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 2
Author: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Release Date: April, 1993 [Etext# 61] [Most recently updated January 20, 2003]
Edition: 12
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Transcribed by Allen Lutins with assistance from Jim Tarzia.
MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY -------------------------------- [From the English edition of
1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]
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.
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor
and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution 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 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, under which industrial production was monopolised 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 on one side 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 revolutionised 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 time, 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
The Legal Small Print 8
that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, 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, 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
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has
drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, 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 and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable
freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, 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 vigour in the Middle Ages, which
Reactionists 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 revolutionising 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 revolutionising 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 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 connexions 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 Reactionists, 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 civilised 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 productions 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
The Legal Small Print 9
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 civilisation. 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 civilisation 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 civilised 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 production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.
The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. 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, canalisation 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: 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 organisation 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 to it, and
by the economical 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 on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of
the entire bourgeois society. 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
The Legal Small Print 10
destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much
industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the
development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for
these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder
into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of
bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get
over these crises? On the one hand inforced 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
piece-meal, 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 organised 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 over-looker, 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
becomes developed, 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 is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages
in cash, 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, retired tradesmen generally, the
handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive