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.
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