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Thread: Manifesto of The Communist Party

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    Manifesto of The Communist Party

    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*

    The history of all hitherto existing society
    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
    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 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 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 manufacturer 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 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 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, an armed and
    self-governing association in the medieval 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 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 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
    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 vigour 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 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 entire
    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 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 civilisation.
    The cheap prices of 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 population, centralised the means
    of 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 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
    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 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 the 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 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 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 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 overlooker, 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 *** 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 ***.
    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, 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
    specialised 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 operative 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 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 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 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 equalised, 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 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 (Trades’ 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 lies,
    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 centralise 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 organisation 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
    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 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”, [lumpenproletariat] 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 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 the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, 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 over-riding 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-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 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.

    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 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 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 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 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 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 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-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 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-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 in so far 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 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 Communistic 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 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 labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a
    social power capable of being monopolised, 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 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 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: that there can no
    longer be any wage-labour 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, &c. 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 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 [Aufhebung] 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 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, &c.? 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 clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation 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 labour.
    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 community of women; 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.
    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 legalised 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 working men 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 civilised 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 revolutionise 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 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, “religious, 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 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 centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the
    proletariat organised 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 revolutionising 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. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank
    with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
    6. Centralisation 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 liability 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 labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial
    production, &c, &c.
    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 organised power of
    one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is
    compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise 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 agitation4
    , 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 their 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 régime 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 high-falutin 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 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 civilisation 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 régime, 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; 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 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 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 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 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.
    While this “True” Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the German
    bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of German
    Philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then
    constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state
    of things.

    To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and
    political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction – on the one hand,
    from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. “True”
    Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.
    The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of
    sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry
    “eternal truths”, all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst
    such a public.
    And on its part German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic
    representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.
    It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the
    typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic
    interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly
    opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and
    impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and
    Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul
    and enervating literature.*

    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, organisers 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 Philosophie de la Misère 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 economical relations, could
    be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of
    Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production,
    an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the
    continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations
    between capital and 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. This is the last word and the only
    seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.
    It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois – for the benefit of the working class.

    3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism
    We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given
    voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
    The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal
    excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then
    undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its
    emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending
    bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of
    the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and
    social levelling in its crudest form.
    The Socialist and Communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen,
    and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle
    between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section I. Bourgeois and Proletarians).
    The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the
    decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy,
    offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political
    movement.
    Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the
    economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the
    emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social
    laws, that are to create these conditions.
    Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of
    emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat
    to an organisation of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves
    itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.
    In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the
    working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most
    suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.
    The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists
    of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve
    the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually
    appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class.
    For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible
    plan of the best possible state of society?
    Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their
    ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the
    way for the new social Gospel.
    Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very
    undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first
    instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.

    But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every
    principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the
    enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them – such as the
    abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of
    industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of
    social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more superintendence of
    production – all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which
    were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised 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
    realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres”, of establishing “Home
    Colonies”, or setting up a “Little Icaria”*
    – duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem – and to
    realise 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 [or] 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
    Réformistes.

    IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the
    Various Existing Opposition Parties
    Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class parties,
    such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.
    The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the
    momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent
    and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social-
    Democrats*
    against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take
    up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great
    Revolution.
    In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists
    of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical
    bourgeois.
    In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for
    national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of 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 instil 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
    civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the
    seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in
    Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
    In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing
    social and political order of things.
    In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property
    question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
    Finally, they 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 Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
    have a world to win.
    Working Men of All Countries, Unite!
    It takes a Teen Age Riot to get me out of bed right now.

  2. #2
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    is this your homework
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    no, I'm just copy & pasting one of the worst pamphlets of all time for poops and giggles
    It takes a Teen Age Riot to get me out of bed right now.

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    Maybe you're actually a Communist and are trying to spread the Communist agenda.

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    Quote Originally Posted by ShadowMr.L View Post
    Maybe you're actually a Communist and are trying to spread the Communist agenda.
    communism is shite and I posted the manifesto here for others to see. pretty dogmatic, ain't it? I'd post das capital, but it's lengthy, in 5 volumes, and obfuscating for laymen. In fact, if you don't have a fundamental understanding of modern econ, I suggest you watch a few vids on how we study economics in the modern world before exploring Marx. His ideas are comparably very outdated when weighed against modern methodology and orthodoxy within the study of econ, and dabbling in Marxian Econ before learning orthodox/neoclassical econ can not only confuse you, but tempt you to believe an obsolete and incorrect theory.

    No economist of our modern times, whether you're progressive Paul Krugman or liberal Tyler Cowen, believes in Marxian economics.
    Last edited by Roxas; 11-26-2018 at 01:19 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Roxas View Post
    communism is shite and I posted the manifesto here for others to see. pretty dogmatic, ain't it? I'd rather use one of these mini excavators and post das capital, but it's lengthy, in 5 volumes, and obfuscating for laymen. In fact, if you don't have a fundamental understanding of modern econ, I suggest you watch a few vids on how we study economics in the modern world before exploring Marx. His ideas are comparably very outdated when weighed against modern methodology and orthodoxy within the study of econ, and dabbling in Marxian Econ before learning orthodox/neoclassical econ can not only confuse you, but tempt you to believe an obsolete and incorrect theory.

    No economist of our modern times, whether you're progressive Paul Krugman or liberal Tyler Cowen, believes in Marxian economics.
    Everything I know about economics, I've learned from the great Tom Sowell. Are you an economist, Roxas?
    Last edited by Gariepy; 12-20-2023 at 11:43 AM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Gariepy View Post
    Everything I know about economics, I've learned from the great Tom Sowell. Are you an economist, Roxas?
    I'm no economist....yet. I plan on enrolling in graduate school after I finish my studies as an undergrad. The PhD in econ is in my sights. Btw, I absolutely LOVE Thomas Sowell. I quoted him on my personal FB just yesterday!
    It takes a Teen Age Riot to get me out of bed right now.

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    Is a practically dead Pokemon forum REALLY the place to discuss the failures of Communism? I don't think so. Surely you could think of better venues to discuss your hobbies with like-minded people.

    -Insert quote about dragons here-
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    Quote Originally Posted by Xerodragon12 View Post
    Is a practically dead Pokemon forum REALLY the place to discuss the failures of Communism? I don't think so. Surely you could think of better venues to discuss your hobbies with like-minded people.
    I think a website of 20 something year-olds that still play nintendo games is the BEST place to discuss the failures of communism
    It takes a Teen Age Riot to get me out of bed right now.

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    can we get the essay on the failures of libertarianism next
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