August 14, 2025 • 39 mins
1. Bourgeois and Proletarians. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto was conceived as an outline of the basic beliefs of the Communist movement. The authors believed that the European Powers were universally afraid of the nascent movement, and were condemning as "communist," people or activities that did not actually conform to what the Communists believed. This Manifesto, then, became a manual for their beliefs. In it we find Marx and Engel's rehearsal of the idea that Capital has stolen away the work of the artisan and peasant by building up factories to produce goods cheaply. The efficiency of Capital depends, then, on the wage laborers who staff the factories and how little they will accept in order to have work. This concentrates power and money in a Bourgeois class that profits from the disunity of workers (Proletarians), who only receive a subsistence wage. If workers unite in a class struggle against the bourgeois, using riot and strikes as weapons, they will eventually overthrow the bourgeois and replace them as a ruling class. Communists further believe in and lay out a system of reforms to transform into a classless, stateless society, thus distinguishing themselves from various flavors of Socialism, which would be content to have workers remain the ruling class after the revolution. The Manifesto caused a huge amount of discussion for its support for a forcible overthrow of the existing politics and society.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto was conceived as an outline of the basic beliefs of the Communist movement. The authors believed that the European Powers were universally afraid of the nascent movement, and were condemning as "communist," people or activities that did not actually conform to what the Communists believed. This Manifesto, then, became a manual for their beliefs. In it we find Marx and Engel's rehearsal of the idea that Capital has stolen away the work of the artisan and peasant by building up factories to produce goods cheaply. The efficiency of Capital depends, then, on the wage laborers who staff the factories and how little they will accept in order to have work. This concentrates power and money in a Bourgeois class that profits from the disunity of workers (Proletarians), who only receive a subsistence wage. If workers unite in a class struggle against the bourgeois, using riot and strikes as weapons, they will eventually overthrow the bourgeois and replace them as a ruling class. Communists further believe in and lay out a system of reforms to transform into a classless, stateless society, thus distinguishing themselves from various flavors of Socialism, which would be content to have workers remain the ruling class after the revolution. The Manifesto caused a huge amount of discussion for its support for a forcible overthrow of the existing politics and society.
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This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by John Ingram. Manifesto of
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the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A
specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. All the
powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance
to exercise this specter. Popenzar, Mettnik and Guizo, French radicals
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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 called
back the branding reproach of communism against the more advanced
opposition parties as well as against its reactionary adversaries. Two
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things result from this fact. First, Communism is already acknowledged
by all European powers to be itself a power. Second,
it is high time that communists should openly, in the
face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims,
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their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter
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,
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Flemish and Danish languages. Section one Bourgeois and pro Mirolitarians.
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history
of class struggles. Freemen and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord
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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 the revolutionary reconstitution of
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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, plebeians, slaves. In the Middle Ages, feudal
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law 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
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established a 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 distinctive feature.
It has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole
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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 town. From these burgesses the first
elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America,
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the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for
the rising bourgeoisie. The East, Indian and Chinese markets, the
colonization 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
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thereby to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society.
A rapid development the feudal system of industry, under which
industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds. Now no longer
sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets, the
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manufacturing system took its place. The guild masters were pushed
on one side height by the manufacturing middle class. Division
of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the
face of division of labour in each single workshop. Meantime,
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the markets kept ever growing, demand ever rising, even manufacture
no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production.
The place of manufacture was taken by the giant modern industry,
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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.
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This development has in its time 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
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the Middle Ages. We see therefore, how the modern bourgeois
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 of that class.
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An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility,
an armed and self governing association in the medieval commune,
here independent urban republic as in Italy and Germany, there
taxable further estate of the monarchy as in francewards in
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the period of manufacture 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
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the modern representative state exclusive political sway. The executive of
the modern state is but a committee from managing the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie historically has
played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has
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got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal,
idyllic relations It has pitilessly torn asunder the modeley feudal
ties the bound men to his natural superiors, and has
left remaining no other nexus between man and man than
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naked self interest, than callous cash payment. It has drowned
the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm,
of philistine sentimentalism in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.
It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in
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place of the number less and feasible chartered freedoms, has
set up that single unconscionable freedom, free trade, in one word,
for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct,
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brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every
occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverend awe.
It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet,
the man of science into its page wage laborers. The
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bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil,
and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that
the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which
reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the
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most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show
what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wanders
far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals. It
has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former
exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
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constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the relations
of production, and with them, the whole relations of society.
Conservation of the old mode of production in unaltered form was,
on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all
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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,
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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 wholly is profaned, and man is at
last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions
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of life and his relations with his kind. The need
of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must
nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has,
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through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan
character to production and consumption in every country. To the
great chagrin of reactionists, 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 a
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daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose
introduction becomes a life and deaf question for all civilized nations.
By industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material,
but material drawn from the remotest zones, industries whose products
are consumed not only a home, but in every quarter
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of the globe. In place of the old wants satisfied
by the productions 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 interdependence
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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
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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 its commodities are the heavy artillery with
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which it batters down all Chinese walls, 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
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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,
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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
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the west. The bourgeois keeps more and more doing away
with the scattered state of the population, of the means
of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production and
has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence
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of this was political centralization. Independent all but loosely connected
provinces with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation
became lumped together into one nay, with one government, one
code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and
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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,
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and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole
continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, all populations conjured out
of the ground. What earlier century had even a presentiment
that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour.
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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
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of the 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
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their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and
political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is
going on before our own eyes modern bourgeois society, with
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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 never world,
whom he is called up by his spells for many
a decade past. The history of industry and commerce is
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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. It is enough to mention the commercial
crises that, by the periodical return, put on its trial,
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each time more threateningly the existence of the entire bourgeois society.
In these crises, a great part not only of the
existing products, but all so of the previously creative productive
forces are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out
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an epidemic that in all earlier epochs would have seen
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,
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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
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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
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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? On
the one hand, enforce destruction of a massive productive forces,
on the other, by the conquest of new markets and
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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 felt
feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie.
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But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that
bring death to itself, it is also called into existence
the men who are to wield these weapons. The modern
working class the proletarians, in proportion as the bourgeoisie i e.
Capital is developed in the same proportion as the proletariat,
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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
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like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed
to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all fluctuations of
the market. Owing to the extensive use of machinery and
division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost
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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
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production of a workman is restricted almost entirely to the
means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance and
for the propagation of his race. But the price of
a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to
the cost of production. In proportion. Therefore, as the repulsiveness
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of the work increases, the wage decreases, nay more in proportion.
As the use of machinery and division of labour increase
in the same proportion that the burden of toil also increases,
whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of
the work exacted in the given time, or by increased
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speed of the machinery, etc. Modern industry has converted the
little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory
of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers crowded into the
factory are organized like soldiers, as privates of the industrial army.
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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 by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The
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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
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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
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manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his
wages in cash than he is set upon by other
portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker,
et cetera. The lower strata of the middle class, the
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small tradespeople, shopkeepers, 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
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is rendered worthless by the 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
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con test is carried on by individual laborers, then by
the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of
one trade in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who
directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the
bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves.
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They destroy imported wares that compete with their labour. They
smash to pieces machinery, They set factories ablaze. They seek
to restore by force the vanished status of the workmen
of the Middle Ages. At this stage, the labourers still
form an incoherent mass, scattered over the whole country and
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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, 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
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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 bourgeoisie. Thus,
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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.
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Its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. 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 labour and nearly everywhere reduces wages
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to the same low level. The growing competition among the
bourgeois and the resulting commercial crises makes the wages of
the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery
ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious.
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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 trades unions against the bourgeois.
They club together in order to keep up the rate
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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
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of their battles lies 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
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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 proletarians,
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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.
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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
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many ways the course of development of the 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 times, of the bourgeoisie of
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foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled
to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help,
and thus to drag it into the political arena. The
bourgeoisie itself therefore supplies the proletariat with its own instruments
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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 classes are,
by the advance of its industry, precipitated into the proletariat,
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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 process of dissolution going on within
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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.
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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
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movement as a whole. Of all the classes that stand
face to face with the bourgeoisie, today, the proletariat alone
is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and
finally disappear in the face of modern industry. The proletariat
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is its special and essential product. The lower middle class,
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
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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 so only in view
of their impending transfer into the proletariat. They thus defend
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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 old society, may
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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 conditions of the proletariat, those of old society
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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 industrial labour,
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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
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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
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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
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insurances of individual property. 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. The proletariat,
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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 of the
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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
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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
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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
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himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois,
under the yoke of feudal absolutism managed to develop into
a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of
rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper
below the conditions of existence of his own class. He
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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
steace society and to impose its conditions of existence upon
society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule
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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 bourgeoisie. In other words, its existence is
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no longer compatible with society. The essential condition for the
existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is
the formation and augmentation of capital. The condition for capital
is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between
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the labourers. The advance of industry, who is in the
voluntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the
laborers due to competition by their revolutionary combination due to association.
The development of modern industry therefore cuts from under its
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feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and
appropriates products. What The bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all is
its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of
the proletariat are equally inevitable. The end of Section one
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of the Manifesto of the Communist Party
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the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by John Ingram. Manifesto of
(00:23):
the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A
specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. All the
powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance
to exercise this specter. Popenzar, Mettnik and Guizo, French radicals
(00:48):
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 called
back the branding reproach of communism against the more advanced
opposition parties as well as against its reactionary adversaries. Two
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things result from this fact. First, Communism is already acknowledged
by all European powers to be itself a power. Second,
it is high time that communists should openly, in the
face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims,
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their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter
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,
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Flemish and Danish languages. Section one Bourgeois and pro Mirolitarians.
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history
of class struggles. Freemen and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord
(02:13):
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 the revolutionary reconstitution of
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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, plebeians, slaves. In the Middle Ages, feudal
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law 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
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established a 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 distinctive feature.
It has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole
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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 town. From these burgesses the first
elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America,
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the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for
the rising bourgeoisie. The East, Indian and Chinese markets, the
colonization 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
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thereby to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society.
A rapid development the feudal system of industry, under which
industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds. Now no longer
sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets, the
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manufacturing system took its place. The guild masters were pushed
on one side height by the manufacturing middle class. Division
of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the
face of division of labour in each single workshop. Meantime,
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the markets kept ever growing, demand ever rising, even manufacture
no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production.
The place of manufacture was taken by the giant modern industry,
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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.
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This development has in its time 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
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the Middle Ages. We see therefore, how the modern bourgeois
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 of that class.
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An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility,
an armed and self governing association in the medieval commune,
here independent urban republic as in Italy and Germany, there
taxable further estate of the monarchy as in francewards in
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the period of manufacture 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
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the modern representative state exclusive political sway. The executive of
the modern state is but a committee from managing the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie historically has
played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has
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got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal,
idyllic relations It has pitilessly torn asunder the modeley feudal
ties the bound men to his natural superiors, and has
left remaining no other nexus between man and man than
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naked self interest, than callous cash payment. It has drowned
the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm,
of philistine sentimentalism in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.
It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in
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place of the number less and feasible chartered freedoms, has
set up that single unconscionable freedom, free trade, in one word,
for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct,
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brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every
occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverend awe.
It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet,
the man of science into its page wage laborers. The
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bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil,
and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that
the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which
reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the
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most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show
what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wanders
far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals. It
has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former
exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
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constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the relations
of production, and with them, the whole relations of society.
Conservation of the old mode of production in unaltered form was,
on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all
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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,
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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 wholly is profaned, and man is at
last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions
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of life and his relations with his kind. The need
of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must
nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has,
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through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan
character to production and consumption in every country. To the
great chagrin of reactionists, 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 a
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daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose
introduction becomes a life and deaf question for all civilized nations.
By industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material,
but material drawn from the remotest zones, industries whose products
are consumed not only a home, but in every quarter
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of the globe. In place of the old wants satisfied
by the productions 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 interdependence
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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
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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 its commodities are the heavy artillery with
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which it batters down all Chinese walls, 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
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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,
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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
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the west. The bourgeois keeps more and more doing away
with the scattered state of the population, of the means
of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production and
has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence
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of this was political centralization. Independent all but loosely connected
provinces with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation
became lumped together into one nay, with one government, one
code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and
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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,
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and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole
continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, all populations conjured out
of the ground. What earlier century had even a presentiment
that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour.
(15:57):
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
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of the 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
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their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and
political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is
going on before our own eyes modern bourgeois society, with
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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 never world,
whom he is called up by his spells for many
a decade past. The history of industry and commerce is
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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. It is enough to mention the commercial
crises that, by the periodical return, put on its trial,
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each time more threateningly the existence of the entire bourgeois society.
In these crises, a great part not only of the
existing products, but all so of the previously creative productive
forces are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out
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an epidemic that in all earlier epochs would have seen
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,
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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
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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
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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? On
the one hand, enforce destruction of a massive productive forces,
on the other, by the conquest of new markets and
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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 felt
feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie.
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But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that
bring death to itself, it is also called into existence
the men who are to wield these weapons. The modern
working class the proletarians, in proportion as the bourgeoisie i e.
Capital is developed in the same proportion as the proletariat,
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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
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like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed
to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all fluctuations of
the market. Owing to the extensive use of machinery and
division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost
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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
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production of a workman is restricted almost entirely to the
means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance and
for the propagation of his race. But the price of
a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to
the cost of production. In proportion. Therefore, as the repulsiveness
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of the work increases, the wage decreases, nay more in proportion.
As the use of machinery and division of labour increase
in the same proportion that the burden of toil also increases,
whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of
the work exacted in the given time, or by increased
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speed of the machinery, etc. Modern industry has converted the
little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory
of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers crowded into the
factory are organized like soldiers, as privates of the industrial army.
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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 by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The
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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
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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
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manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his
wages in cash than he is set upon by other
portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker,
et cetera. The lower strata of the middle class, the
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small tradespeople, shopkeepers, 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
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is rendered worthless by the 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
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con test is carried on by individual laborers, then by
the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of
one trade in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who
directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the
bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves.
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They destroy imported wares that compete with their labour. They
smash to pieces machinery, They set factories ablaze. They seek
to restore by force the vanished status of the workmen
of the Middle Ages. At this stage, the labourers still
form an incoherent mass, scattered over the whole country and
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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, 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
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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 bourgeoisie. Thus,
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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.
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Its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. 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 labour and nearly everywhere reduces wages
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to the same low level. The growing competition among the
bourgeois and the resulting commercial crises makes the wages of
the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery
ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious.
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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 trades unions against the bourgeois.
They club together in order to keep up the rate
(28:00):
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
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of their battles lies 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
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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 proletarians,
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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.
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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
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many ways the course of development of the 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 times, of the bourgeoisie of
(30:20):
foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled
to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help,
and thus to drag it into the political arena. The
bourgeoisie itself therefore supplies the proletariat with its own instruments
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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 classes are,
by the advance of its industry, precipitated into the proletariat,
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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 process of dissolution going on within
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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.
(31:45):
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
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movement as a whole. Of all the classes that stand
face to face with the bourgeoisie, today, the proletariat alone
is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and
finally disappear in the face of modern industry. The proletariat
(32:33):
is its special and essential product. The lower middle class,
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
(32:55):
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 so only in view
of their impending transfer into the proletariat. They thus defend
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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 old society, may
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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 conditions of the proletariat, those of old society
(34:00):
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 industrial labour,
(34:20):
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
(34:43):
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
(35:04):
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
(35:25):
insurances of individual property. 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. The proletariat,
(35:52):
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 of the
(36:14):
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
(36:35):
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
(36:57):
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
(37:22):
himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois,
under the yoke of feudal absolutism managed to develop into
a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of
rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper
below the conditions of existence of his own class. He
(37:45):
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
steace society and to impose its conditions of existence upon
society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule
(38:09):
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 bourgeoisie. In other words, its existence is
(38:31):
no longer compatible with society. The essential condition for the
existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is
the formation and augmentation of capital. The condition for capital
is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between
(38:55):
the labourers. The advance of industry, who is in the
voluntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the
laborers due to competition by their revolutionary combination due to association.
The development of modern industry therefore cuts from under its
(39:16):
feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and
appropriates products. What The bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all is
its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of
the proletariat are equally inevitable. The end of Section one
(39:44):
of the Manifesto of the Communist Party
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