The Communist Manifesto

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, yet the accusation of communism is hurled by government and opposition alike against their adversaries. This very fact proves that communism is already acknowledged by all European powers as a power in itself. 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.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. From the free man and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, down through the ages, society has been divided into a hierarchy of classes, with oppressors and oppressed standing in constant opposition to one another. Each epoch, driven by changes in the means of production, has seen the rise of new dominant classes and the overthrow of old ones. The modern bourgeois society, which has sprung from the ruins of feudal society, has not abolished class antagonisms; it has merely established new classes, new conditions of oppression, and new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, is distinguished by having simplified 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.

The bourgeoisie, through its relentless drive for profit and constant revolutionizing of the instruments and relations of production, has played a most revolutionary part in history. It has torn asunder the feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," leaving no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest and callous cash payment. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers. The bourgeoisie has created enormous cities, drawn immense populations into them, and has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. Its need for an ever-expanding market chases it over the whole surface of the globe, creating a world after its own image.

However, the very weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism are now turned against itself. The development of industry has not only created the conditions for its own existence but has also called into being the men who are to wield those weapons - the modern working class, the proletarians. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition and all the fluctuations of the market. The more repulsive the work, the lower the wage; the more the use of machinery and division of labor increases, the more burdensome the toil.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. Its struggle against the bourgeoisie begins with its very existence. At first, the contest 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 state, but against the instruments of production themselves. But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number but is concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. Collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes.

The Communists are distinguished from other working-class parties by this: they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 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. Their immediate aim is the formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, and the conquest of political power by the proletariat. The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

This abolition is not of property in general, but of bourgeois private property, which 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. We have no desire 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. But in bourgeois society, accumulated 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.

To achieve this, certain measures will be necessary in the most advanced countries. These include the abolition of property in land and the application of all rents of land to public purposes; a heavy progressive or graduated income tax; abolition of all right of inheritance; confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels; centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly; centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state; extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; equal liability of all to labor, and the establishment of industrial armies; combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, and the gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country; and free education for all children in public schools, along with the abolition of child factory labor.

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.

The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. 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 Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!