| 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 plebian, 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, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal
lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of
these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois
society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away
with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the
epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified
class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great
hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie
and Proletariat. From the serfs of
the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these
burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery
of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.
The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the
colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally,
gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and
thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid
development. The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production
was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants
of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters
were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between
the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each
single workshop. Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising.
Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized
industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, modern
industry, the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires,
the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry
has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the
way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation,
to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension
of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended,
in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed
into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore,
how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development,
of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. Each
step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding
political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal
nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune;
here independent urban republic; there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy;
afterward, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal
or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact,
cornerstone of the great monarchies in general -- the bourgeoisie has at last,
since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered
for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The
executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most
revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has
put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn
asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and
has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
"cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor,
of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place
of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable
freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political
illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The
bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked
up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest,
the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie
has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family
relation into a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came
to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries
so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It
has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished
wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals;
has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations
and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing
the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production
in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for
all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish
the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with
their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,
all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie
over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation
of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption
in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under
the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established
national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are
dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question
for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw
material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products
are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of
the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants,
requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In
place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse
in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material,
so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more
and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there
arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all
instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication,
draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices
of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely
obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain
of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce
what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois
themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. The bourgeoisie
has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities,
has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has
thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian
and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants
on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. The bourgeoisie keeps more and
more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production,
and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production,
and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this
was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces,
with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped
together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national
class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff. The bourgeoisie, during
its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal
productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of
nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture,
steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents
for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the
ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces
slumbered in the lap of social labor? We see then: the means of production
and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated
in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production
and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged,
the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word,
the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already
developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst
asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition,
accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic
and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before
our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange
and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production
and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers
of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past,
the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern
productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property
relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its
rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical
return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time
more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products,
but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.
In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would
have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly
finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a
famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means
of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there
is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too
much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend
to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary,
they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered,
and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole
of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions
of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And
how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? One the one hand, by enforced
destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new
markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say,
by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing
the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie
felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself;
it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons - the
modern working class - the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie,
i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat,
the modern working class, developed - a class of laborers, who live only so long
as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.
These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every
other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes
of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. Owing to the extensive
use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has
lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He
becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous,
and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production
of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that
he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price
of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production.
In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage
decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of
labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether
by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a
given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc. Modern Industry has converted
the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial
capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers.
As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect
hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois
class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,
by the overlooker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.
The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more
petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. The less the skill
and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern
industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of
women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity
for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to
use, according to their age and sex. No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer
by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than
he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper,
the pawnbroker, etc. The lower strata of the middle class - the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants
- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive
capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on,
and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their
specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the
proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. The proletariat
goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle
with the bourgeoisie. At first, the contest is carried on by individual laborers,
then by the work of people of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in
one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They
direct their attacks not against the bourgeois condition of production, but against
the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete
with their labor, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they
seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the
whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite
to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active
union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its
own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is
moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians
do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of
absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.
Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie;
every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie. But with the development
of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated
in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various
interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more
and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of
labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing
competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the
wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery,
ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious;
the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and
more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin
to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together
in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order
to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the
contest breaks out into riots. Now and then the workers are victorious, but
only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result,
but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the
improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that
place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was
just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles,
all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every
class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers
of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern
proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years. This organization
of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into a political party, is
continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.
But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative
recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the
divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours bill in England was
carried. Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further
in many ways the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds
itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on,
with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic
to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries.
In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to
ask for help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself,
therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general
education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting
the bourgeoisie. Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling
class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are
at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat
with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress. Finally, in times when the
class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within
the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such
a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself
adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in
its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility
went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to
the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who
have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical
movement as a whole. Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie
today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes
decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is
its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer,
the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie,
to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They
are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary,
for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary,
they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they
thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own
standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. The "dangerous class",
the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of
the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian
revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part
of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. In the condition of the proletariat,
those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is
without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything
in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection
to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped
him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him
so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois
interests. All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify
their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions
of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces
of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and
thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of
their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities
for, and insurances of, individual property. All previous historical movements
were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian
movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority,
in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of
our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent
strata of official society being sprung into the air. Though not in substance,
yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first
a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of
all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. In depicting the most general
phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled
civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks
out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays
the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. Hitherto, every form of society
has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed
classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to
it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in
the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the
petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into
a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process
of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his
own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population
and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer
to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon
society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to
assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting
him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.
Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence
is no longer compatible with society. The essential conditions for the existence
and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital;
the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition
between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the
revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry,
therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie
produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above
all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are
equally inevitable. |
