II
Proletarians and
Communists In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians
as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other
working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those
of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles
of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement. The Communists
are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In
the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point
out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently
of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the struggle
of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always
and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists,
therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced and resolute section
of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward
all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of
the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the
conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The
immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties:
Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy,
conquest of political power by the proletariat. The theoretical conclusions
of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented,
or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express,
in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle,
from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing
property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism. All property
relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent
upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example,
abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property. The distinguishing
feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition
of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and
most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products
that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single
sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached
with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the
fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of
all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned
property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant,
a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish
that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it,
and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private
property? But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit.
It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor,
and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of
wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on
the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social, status
in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action
of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members
of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not only personal;
it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property,
into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby
transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property
that is changed. It loses its class character. Let us now take wage labor.
The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum
of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer
in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates
by means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence.
We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of
labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human
life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All
that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation,
under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live
only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it. In bourgeois
society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist
society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the
existence of the laborer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates
the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois
society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person
is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things
is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly
so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois
freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois
conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling
and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about
free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeois about
freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling
and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning
when opposed to the communist abolition of buying and selling, or the bourgeois
conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself. You are horrified
at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society,
private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population;
its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those
nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form
of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence
of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach
us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what
we intend. From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital,
money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e.,
from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois
property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes. You
must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the
bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed,
be swept out of the way, and made impossible. Communism deprives no man of
the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive
him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work
will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois
society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those
who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another
expression of the tautology: There can no longer be any wage labor when there
is no longer any capital. All objections urged against the communistic mode
of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been
urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating intellectual
products. Just as to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the
disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to
him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss
of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as
a machine. But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended
abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom,
culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of
your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is
but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character
and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your
class. The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal
laws of nature and of reason the social forms stringing from your present mode
of production and form of property -- historical relations that rise and disappear
in the progress of production - this misconception you share with every ruling
class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property,
what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to
admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property. Abolition of the
family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital,
on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among
the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical
absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois
family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both
will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to
stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home
education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined
by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or
indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended
the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character
of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling
class. The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed
correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by
the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are
torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce
and instruments of labor. But you Communists would introduce community or women,
screams the bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument
of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited
in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being
common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion
that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments
of production. For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation
of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly
and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce
free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial. Our bourgeois, not content
with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to
speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's
wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus,
at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they
desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly
legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition
of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of free love
springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and
nationality. The 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 civilized countries
at least is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be
put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end
to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes,
the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. The charges against
communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological
standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination. Does it require deep
intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conception, in one word,
man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material
existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the
history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character
in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age
have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of the ideas
that revolutionize society, they do but express that fact that within the old
society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution
of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of
existence. When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth
century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the
then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of
conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain
of knowledge. "Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical,
and juridicial ideas have been modified in the course of historical development.
But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived
this change." There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice,
etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal
truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them
on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society
has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed
different forms at different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken,
one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part
of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past
ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain
common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the
total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most
radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved
the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. But let us have done with
the bourgeois objections to Communism. We have seen above that the first step
in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position
of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its
political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to
centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e.,
of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive
forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be
effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on
the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which
appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the
movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social
order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of
production. These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally
applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of
land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3.
Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of
all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State,
by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6.
Centralization of the means of communication and transport in he hands of the
State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the
State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the
soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all
to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of
all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of
the populace over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public
schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination
of education with industrial production, etc. When, in the course of development,
class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated
in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will
lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the
organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during
its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances,
to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the
ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production,
then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for
the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby
have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois
society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association
in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all. | 
