lb-config/includes.chroot/lib/manifesto

MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY

[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]

A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism.  All the Powers of old
Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and
Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its
opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the
branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as
well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact.

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a
Power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole
world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery
tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and
sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French,
German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to
one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight
that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at
large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated
arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank.
In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle
Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in
almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society
has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes,
new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive
feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and
more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly
facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest
towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were
developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for
the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of
America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse
never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering
feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised
by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new
markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed
on one side 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 the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture
no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial
production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry,
the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the
leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of
America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce,
to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in 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 the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long
course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and
of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a
corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway
of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval
commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there
taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period
of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy
as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great
monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of
Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern
representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern
State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the
motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious
fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy
water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange
value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible 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, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and
looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the
priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The 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
vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting
complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what
man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing
Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted
expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

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. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered
form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier
industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,
are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at
last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions 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 connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the
great chagrin of 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 are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new
industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all
civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material,
but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are
consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the
old wants, satisfied by the 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 inter-dependence of nations. And as in
material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of
individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and
narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous
national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by
the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most
barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are
the heavy artillery with 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 civilisation into their
midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world
after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has
created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared
with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from
the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the
towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the
civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the
West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the
population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated
production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary
consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely
connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of
taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code
of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The
bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more
massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations
together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of
chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric
telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of
rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground--what earlier century had
even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social
labour?

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
organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal
relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed
productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder;
they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political
constitution adapted 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 its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that
has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the
sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom
he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry
and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces
against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are
the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is
enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on
its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois
society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but
also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In
these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would
have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly
finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a
famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of
subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there
is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too
much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend
to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the
contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are
fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into
the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.
The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth
created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one
hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the
conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.
That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive
crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now
turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself;
it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons--the
modern working class--the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same
proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed--a class of
labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so
long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell
themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce,
and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the
fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of
the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm
for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most
simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of
him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely,
to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the
propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of
labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion therefore, as the
repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion
as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion
the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours,
by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased 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 organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial
army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and
sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois
State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker,
and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more
openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the
more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other
words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour 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
labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an
end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other
portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

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, partly because their diminutive capital does not
suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in
the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized
skill is rendered worthless by 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 contest is carried on by
individual labourers, 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;
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 workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the
whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite
to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active
union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its
own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is
moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the
proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the
remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the
petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the
hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the
bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in
number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it
feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within
the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as
machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces
wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and
the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more
fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly
developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions
between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the
character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form
combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order
to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make
provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest
breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of
their battles 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 just this contact that was needed
to centralise 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, thanks to
railways, achieve in a few years.

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. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It
compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by
taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the
ten-hours' bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many
ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself
involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with
those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become
antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of
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 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 industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least
threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat
with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the 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. Just as, therefore, at an earlier
period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion
of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of
the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the
proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and
finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special
and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the
shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie,
to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They
are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are
reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they
are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the
proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests,
they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off
by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the
movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare
it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already
virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife
and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois
family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the
same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of
every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many
bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois
interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their
already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of
appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces
of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and
thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of
their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous
securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the
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, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot
stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of
official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the
bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country
must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we
traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to
the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent
overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the
proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the
antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class,
certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue
its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to
membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of 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 becomes a pauper,
and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it
becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class
in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an
over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an
existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him
sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.
Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence
is no longer compatible with society.

The essential 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 the
laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by
their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern
Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the
bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore,
produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS!