Monster Media 1994 #1/monster.zip/monster/EDUCATE/USCON2.ZIP/USCON3.ZIP/COMFEST.DAT

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                   Manifesto of the Communist Party

  The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
  Reprinted in its entirety with the exception of part III, a
  short polemic against certain political groups of their time
  (1847) with whom Marx and Engels disagreed.

  A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of Communism.  All
  the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to
  exorcise this specter:  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 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 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, Flemish, and Danish
  languages.

                       I.  Bourgeois and Proletarians


  The history of all hitherto existing society 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 reconstitution
  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 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 thereby, to the
  revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid
  development.

  The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production
  was monopolized 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 aside by the
  manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the
  different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of
  labor in each single workshop.

  Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the 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, 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 turn, 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 developement, of a series of
  revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

  Each step in the development of the was accompanied by a
  corresponding political advance of that class.  An oppressed
  class under the sway of the feudal nobility, it became an
  armed and self-governing association in the medieval 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, the 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 has played a most revolutionary role in history.

  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 no other bond between
  man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cashpayment."
  It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor,
  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
  indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
  unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade.  In one word for
  exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it
  has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

  The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation
  hitherto honored 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-laborers.

  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 vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries
  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 migrations of nations and crusades.

  The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing
  the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of
  production, and of production in unaltered form, was, on the
  contrary, the first condition of existence for all 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, 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
  connections 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 reactionaries, it has
  drawn from under the feed 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 civilized 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 production 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 nations, even the most barbarian, into civilization.
  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 civilization into their midst, i.e.,
  to become bourgeois themselves.  In a word, it creates a world
  after its own image.

  The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rules of the
  towns.  It has created the 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 the barbarian and semi-barbarian countries
  dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations
  of bourgeois, the East on the West.

  More and more the bourgeoisie keeps doing away with the
  scattered state of the population, of the means of production,
  and of property.  It has agglomerated population, centralized the
  means of production, and has concentrated property in a few
  hands.  The necessary consequence of this was political
  centralization.  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,
  canalization of rivers, while populations conjured out of the
  ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that
  such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

  We see then that the means of production and of exchange, which
  served as the foundation for the growth of the bourgeoisie, 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 of agriculture and manufacturing
  industry, in a word, the feudal relations of property became no
  longer compatible with the already developed productive forces;
  they became so many fetters.  They had to 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
  economic 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 hs 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 history
  of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of
  modern productive forces against the modern conditions of
  production, against the property relations that are the
  conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and its rule.
  It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their
  periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois
  society on trial, each time more threateningly.  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 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
  civilization, 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 no sooner do they overcome these fetters than
  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 by enforced 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 laborers, who live only so long
  as they find work, and who find world only so long as their
  labor increases capital.  These laborers, who must sell
  themselves piecemeal, 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
  labor, 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
  labor, 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 labor 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 laborers, crowded into the factory, are
  organized 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
  labor, in other words, the more modern industry develops, the
  more is the labor 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 has the laborer received his wages in cash, for the
  moment escaping exploitation by the manufacturer, 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, and 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 new methods of
  production.  Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes
  of the population.

  The proletariat goes through various stages of development.  With
  the birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie.  At first the
  contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the work
  people 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 labor, they smash machinery to pieces, they set
  factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished
  status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

  At this stage the laborers 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 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 still able to do so for a
  time.  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 bourgeois.  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 equalized, in proportion as
  machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor 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, make 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
  (trade unions) against the bourgeoisie; 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 furthered by the improve means of communication which
  are created by modern industry, and which place the workers of
  different localities in contact with one another.  It was 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, 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.  It
  compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the
  workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the
  bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hour bill in England was
  carried.

  Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society
  further the course of development of the proletariat in many
  ways.  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 elements 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 old 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 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 adopt that of the proletariat.

  The "dangerous class," the social scum (Lumpenproletariat), 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.

  The social conditions of the old society no longer exist for the
  proletariat.  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 labor, 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 interest of minorities.  The proletarian movement is
  the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority,
  in the interest 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 up 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 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 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 the bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no
  longer compatible with society.

  The essential condition for the existence and sway of the
  bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital;
  the condition for capital is wage-labor.  Wage-labor rests
  exclusively on competition between the laborers.  The advance
  of industry, whose involuntary 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 feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces
  and appropriates products.  What the bourgeoisie therefore
  produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.  Its fall and
  the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.


                      II.  Proletarians and Communists

  In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as
  a whole?

  The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other
  working class parties.

  They have no interests separate and apart from those of the
  proletariat as a whole.

  They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by
  which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

  The Communists are distinguished from the other working class
  parties by this only:

  1. in the national struggles of the proletarians of the
     different countries, they point out and bring to the front
     the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently
     of all nationality.

  2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of
     the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass
     through, they always and everywhere represent the interests
     of the movement as a whole.

  The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the
  most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties
  of every country, that section which pushes forward all others;
  on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass
  of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the
  line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results
  of the proletarian movement.

  The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all
  the other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat
  into a class, overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, conquest of
  political power by the proletariat.

  The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way
  based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or
  discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

  They merely express, in general terms, actual relations
  springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical
  movement going on under our very eyes.  The abolition of
  existing property relations is not at all a distinctive
  feature of Communism.

  All property relations in the past have continually been subject
  to historical change consequent upon the change in historical
  conditions.

  The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in
  favor of bourgeois property.

  The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of
  property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.
  But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most
  complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating
  products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation
  of the many by the few.

  In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in
  the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

  We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing
  the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a
  man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork
  of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

  Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property!  Do you mean the
  property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form
  of property that preceded the bourgeois form?  There is no need
  to abolish that, the development of industry has to a great
  extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

  Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?

  But does wage-labor create any property for the laborer?
  Not a bit.  It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property
  which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon
  the condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh
  exploitation.  property, in it present form, is based on the
  antagonism of capital and wage-labor.  let us examine both sides
  of this antagonism.

  To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a
  social status in production.  Capital is a collective product,
  and only the united action of many members, nay, in the last
  resort, only by the united action of all members of society,
  can it be set in motion.

  Capital is therefore not personal, it is a social, power.

  When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into
  the property of all members of society, personal property is not
  thereby transformed into social property.  It is only the social
  character of the property that is now changed.  It loses its
  class character.

  Let us now take wage-labor.

  The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i.e. that
  quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely
  requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer.
  What, therefore, the wage-laborer appropriates by means of his
  labor, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare
  existence.  We by no means intend to abolish this personal
  appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that
  is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life,
  and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of
  others.  All that we want to do away with is the miserable
  character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives
  merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only insofar
  as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

  In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase
  accumulated labor.  In Communist society, accumulated labor is
  but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the
  laborer.

  In bourgeois society, therefore, the pas dominates the present;
  in Communist society, the present dominates the past.  In
  bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality,
  while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

  And the abolition of this state of things is called by the
  bourgeoisie, abolition of individuality and freedom!  And
  rightly so.  The abolition of bourgeois individuallity,
  bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly
  aimed at.

  By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of
  production, free trade, free selling and buying.

  But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying
  disappears also.  This talk about free selling and buying, and
  all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in
  general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted
  selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle
  Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communist abolition
  of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production,
  and of the bourgeoisie itself.

  You are horrified at our intending to do away with private
  property.  But in your existing society, private property is
  already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its
  existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the
  hands of the nine-tenths.  You reproach us, therefore, with
  intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary
  condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any
  property for the immense majority of society.

  In a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
  property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

  From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into
  capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being
  monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property
  can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into
  capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.

  You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no
  other person than the bourgeois, than the middle class owner of
  property.  This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way,
  and made impossible.

  Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the
  products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of
  the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such
  appropriation.

  It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private
  property all work will cease, and universal laziness will
  overtake us.

  According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have
  gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its
  members who work, acquire noting, and those who acquire
  anything, do not work.  The whole of this objection is but
  another expression of the tautology:  There can no longer be
  any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital.

  All objections urged against the Communist mode of producing
  and appropriating material products, have, in the same way,
  been urged against the Communist modes of producing and
  appropriating intellectual products.  Just as, to the
  bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the
  disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of
  class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all
  culture.

  That culture, the loss of which he laments is, for the enormous
  majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

  But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended
  abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois
  notions of freedom, culture, law, etc.  Your very ideas are but
  the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and
  bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will
  of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential
  character are determined by the economic conditions of existence
  of your class.

  The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into
  eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing
  from your present mode of production and form of property --
  historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of
  production -- this misconception you share with every ruling
  class that has preceded you.  What you see clearly in the case
  of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal
  property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case
  of your own bourgeois form of property.

  Abolition of the family!  Even the most radical flare up at
  this infamous proposal of the Communists.

  On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family,
  based?

  On capital, on private gain.  In its completely developed form
  this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.  But this state
  of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the
  family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

  The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
  complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of
  capital.

  Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of
  children by their parents?  To this crime we plead guilty.

  But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations,
  when we replace home education by social.

  And your education!  Is not that also social, and determined by
  the social conditions under which you educate, by the
  intervention of society, dire or indirect, by means of schools,
  etc.?  The Communists have not invented the intervention of
  society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of
  that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of
  the ruling class.

  The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the
  hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more
  disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all
  family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their
  children are transformed into simple articles of commerce and
  instruments of labor.

  But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams
  the whole of the bourgeoisie in chorus.

  The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.
  He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited
  in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than
  that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the
  women.

  He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to
  do away with the status of women as mere instruments of
  production.

  For the rest, noting is more ridiculous than the virtuous
  indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which,
  they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by
  the Communists.  The Communists have no need to introduce
  community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

  Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters
  of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common
  prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's
  wives.

  Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and
  thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be
  reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution
  for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of
  women.  For the rest, it is self-evident, that the abolition of
  the present system of production must bring with it the abolition
  of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of
  prostitution in both public and private.

  The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish
  countries and nationality.

  The workingmen have no country.  We cannot take from them what
  they have not got.  Since the proletariat must first of all
  acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class
  of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so
  far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the
  word.

  National differences and antagonisms between peoples are
  vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the development
  of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world
  market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the
  conditions of life corresponding thereto.

  The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish
  still faster, united action, of the leading civilized
  countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the
  emancipation of the proletariat.

  In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another
  is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will
  also be put an end to.

  In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the
  nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will
  come to an end.

  The charges against Communism made from a religious, a
  philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint,
  are not deserving of serious examination.

  Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas,
  views, and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness,
  changes with every change in the conditions of his material
  existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

  What else does the history of ideas prove, than that
  intellectual production changes its character in proportion as
  material production is changed?  The ruling ideas of each age
  have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

  When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do
  but express the fact that within the old society the elements
  of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the
  old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old
  conditions of existence.

  When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient
  religions were overcome by Christianity.  When Christian ideas
  succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal
  society fought its death-battle with the then revolutionary
  bourgeoisie.  The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of
  conscience, merely gave expression to the sway of free
  competition within the domain of knowledge.

  "Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religion, moral, philosophical
  and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of
  historical development.  But religion, morality, philosophy,
  political science, and law, constantly survived this change.

  "There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice,
  etc., that are common to all states of society.  But Communism
  abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all
  morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it
  therefore acts in contradiction to all pas historical
  experience."

  What does this accusation reduce itself to?  The history of all
  past society has consisted in the development of class
  antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at
  different epochs.

  But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all
  past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the
  other no wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past
  ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays,
  moves with certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot
  completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class
  antagonisms.

  The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with
  traditional property relations; no wonder that its development
  involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

  But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.

  We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the
  working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of
  ruling class, to establish democracy.

  The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by
  degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all
  instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of
  the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase
  the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

  Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by
  means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the
  conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures,
  therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable,
  but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves,
  necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are
  unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of
  production.

  These measures will of course be different in different
  countries.

  Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will
  be pretty generally applicable.

  1.  Abolition of property in land and application of all rents
      of land to public purposes.

  2.  A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

  3.  Abolition of all right of inheritance.

  4.  Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

  5.  Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means
      of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive
      monopoly.

  6.  Centralization of the means of communication and transport in
      the hands of the state.

  7.  Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by
      the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and
      the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a
      common plan.

  8.  Equal obligation of all to work.  Establishment of industrial
      armies, especially for agriculture.

  9.  Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries;
      gradual abolition of the distinction between town and
      country, by a more equable distribution of population over
      the country.

 10.  Free education for all children in public schools.
      Abolition of child factory labor in its present form.
      Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

  When, in the course of development, class distinctions have
  disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the
  hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public
  power will lose its political character. Political power,
  properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class
  for oppressing another.  If the proletariat during its contest
  with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of
  circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a
  revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such sweeps
  away by force the old conditions of production, then it will,
  along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for
  the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally,
  and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

  In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and
  class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the
  free development of each is the condition for the free
  development of all....

  [ Section III is omitted. ]

  IV.  Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various
       Existing Opposition Parties


  Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to
  the existing working class parties, such as the Chartists in
  England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.

  The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims,
  for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working
  class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent
  and take care of the future of that movement.  In France the
  Communists ally themselves with the Social-Democrats, against
  the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however,
  the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases
  and illusions traditionally handed down from the great
  Revolution.

  In Switzerland they support the Radicals, without losing sight
  of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements,
  partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly
  of radical bourgeois.

  In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian
  revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation,
  that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.

  In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in
  a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal
  squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.

  But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the
  working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile
  antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that
  the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons
  against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions
  that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its
  supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary
  classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may
  immediately begin.

  The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because
  that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is
  bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of
  European civilization and with a much more developed proletariat
  than what existed in England in the 17th and in France in the
  18th century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany
  will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian
  revolution.

  In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary
  movement against the existing social and political order of
  things.

  In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading
  question in each case, the property question, no matter what its
  degree of development at the time.

  Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of
  the democratic parties of all countries.

  The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.  They
  openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the
  forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.  Let the
  ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.  The
  proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.  They have
  a world to win.

  Workingmen of all countries, unite!