IV
The 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 Krakow in 1846. In
Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way,
against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working class
the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie
and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many
weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the
bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order
that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against
the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin. The Communists turn their attention
chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution
that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization
and with a much more developed proletariat than 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 labor everywhere
for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The
Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their
ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have
nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of
All Countries, Unite! | 
