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Introduction
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 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.
Friedreich Engels
[Chapter] I. Bourgeoisie 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
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 clash
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, under 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 on one side 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 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 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, 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 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 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,
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 Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly
revolutionizing 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
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 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 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
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 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 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 civilized 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 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, whole 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: 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 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 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 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 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 work only so long as their labor increases
capital. These laborers, 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 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
becomes developed, 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 is the exploitation of the laborer
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 laborers, then by the
working 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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-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
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 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-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, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and
the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
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