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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.
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