MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY [From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]
Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto.
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles .
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders.
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.
The discovery of America , the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.
The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production , and with them the whole relations of society.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
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 bourgeoisie and of its rule.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman.
The lower strata of the middle class – the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition.
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 bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses.
Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots. Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of 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.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.
Every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour.
Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.
The Communists have not invented 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 working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the 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.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations ; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
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.
Christian Socialism is but the holy, water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
The mediaeval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie.
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends , made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.
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 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.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
