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!
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