Revolutionary Program and Strategy develop

Revolutionary Program and Strategy develop Assignment Help 472 Revolutionary Program and Strategy develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peas- ants. Now the question is: Can the Russian obshchina,4 though greatly undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting-point for a communist development.

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Revolutionary Program and Strategy develop
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London, January 21, 1882 Karl Marx Friedrich Engels
Preface to the German Edition of 1883
The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole working class of Europe and America owes more than to anyone else, rests at Highgate Cemetery and over his grave the first grass is already growing. Since his death, there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. All the more do I consider it necessary again to state here the following expressly:
The basic thought running through the Manifesto-that eco- nomic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that conse- quently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal owner- ship of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, hmvever, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles-this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.
I hae already stated this many times; but precisely now it is necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.
London,_ June 28, 1883 Friedrich Engels
4. Village community.
Manifesto of the Communist Party 473
MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exor- cise 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 lan- guages.
I. Bourgeois and Proletarians5
The history of all hitherto existing society6 is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
5. By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employ- ers of wage-labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their la- bour-power in order to live. [Engels, English editiOil of 1888] 6. That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social or- ganisation existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village com- munities were found to be, or to have
been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primaeval com- munities society begins to be differen- tiated into separate and finally antag- onistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in: “Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privat- eigenthums und des Staats” [The Ori- gin of the Family, Private Property and the State], 2nd edition, Stuttgart 1886. [Engels, English edition of 1888]
474 Revolutionary Program and Strategy guild-master7 and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninter- rupted, 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 colonisation of America, trade with the colo- nies, 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 manu- facturing 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 manu- facture 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.
7. Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild. [Engels, English edition of of a guild, a master within, not a head 1888]
Manifesto of the Communist Party 475
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 communica- tion by land. This development has, in its tum, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoi- sie 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 prod- uct 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 accompa- nied 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;8 here inde- pendent 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 bourgeoi- sie 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 supe- riors,” 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 chival- rous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, ahd in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered free- doms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom-Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illu- sions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. 8. “Commune” was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even be- fore they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self- government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speakinfl:, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political
development, France. [Engels, English edition of 1888]
This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or wrested their initial rights of self- ~;overnment from their feudal lords. [Engels, German edition of 1890]
..
476 Revolutionary Program and Strategy 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 tom 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 indo- lence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyra- mids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade aU former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
1)e ~isie-.c~ eleist without constantly tevelutionising the instnunent.s of.~, and thereby the relations of produc- tion, and with them the whole relations of societv. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, w~s, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for aU earlier industrial classes. Con- stant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. AU fixed, fast-frozen rela- tions, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opin- ions, are swept away, aU new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, aU that is holy is pro- faned, 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 lllaJket .tot its products chases the bo}lrgeoisie over the wh9le sw;fa~ Qf ti.tl.oe. It taust nest}~ 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 ind~stries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civi- lised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; indus- tries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the pro- ductions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satis- faction 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
Manifesto of the Communist Party 477 of individual nations become common property. National one-sided- ness 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 pro- duction; 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 civ- ilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and mote doing away with the scat- tered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised means of pro- duction, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The neces-. sary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but looselv 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 agricul- ture, steam-naYigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole popu- lations conjured out of the ground-what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
Ve 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 agricul- ture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations
478 Revolutionary Program and Strategy of property became no longer compatible with the already devel- oped 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 economi- cal and political sway of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modem 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 modem productive forces against modem conditions of production, against the prop- erty relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bour- geoisie 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 bar barism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and com- merce 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 bour- geois 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 bour- geois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The con- ditions 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 pro- ductive 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 modem working class-the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the
Manifesto of the Communist Party 479 same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, devel- oped-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 com- modity, 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 appen- dage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monoto- nous, 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 mainte- nance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a com- modity, and therefore also of labour,9 is equal to its cost of produc- tion. 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 patriar- chal 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 devel- oped, 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 manufac- turer, 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, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen
9. Subsequently Marx pointed out that the worker sells not his labour but his labour power.
480 Revolutionary Program and Strategy
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 com- petition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised 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 its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by indiYidual 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 fom1 an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competi- tion. 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 moreoyer 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 monarchv, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole his- torical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the deYelopment 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 dis- tinctions 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 pre- carious; 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.
Manifesto of the Communist Party 481
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 modem 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 modem proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and conse- quently 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 recogni- tion 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 ele- ments of political and general education, in other words, it fur- nishes 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 prole- tariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlighten- ment 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 bour- geoisie 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
482 Revolutionary Program and Strategy
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 historv. 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, thev desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passivelv 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 familv-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. , morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as manv bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to for- tify their already acquired status by subjecting societv at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except bv abolishing their ovm previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also everv 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 prole- tariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The prole- tariat 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
Manifesto of the Communist Party 483
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, everv form of societv 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 labourer, 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 evi- dent, 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 bv him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with societv.
The ess~ntial 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 labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combi- nation, due to association. The development of J!Iodern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the verv foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates pr~ducts. Vhat the bourgeoi- sie. therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the ,ictory of the proletariat arc 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 pro- letariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class
484 Revolutionary Program and Strategy parties by this only: ( 1) In the national struggles of the proletari- ans 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 bourgoisie 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 prole- tariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian move- ment.
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 the 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, hy 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 condi- tions.
The French Re,olution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour 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 hv the few.
. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
vVe Communists have been reproached with the desire of abol- ishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, 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
Manifesto of the Communist Party 485
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 pri,ate property? But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a
bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Prop- erty, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a 5ocial status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by 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 a personal, it is a social power. Vhen, 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 charac- ter of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.
Let us now take wage-labour. The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that
quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, there- fore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do awav with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accu- mulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past 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 bour- geois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
486 Revolutionary Program and Strategy
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 dis- appears 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 ~’fiddle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic 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 prop- erty. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solelv due to its non-existence in the hands of those 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 prope~ty for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monop- olised, 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 labour 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 nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and approp.riating material products, haYe, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriat- ing intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappear-
Manifesto of the Communist Party 487
ance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disap- pearance 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, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bour- geois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direc- tion are determined by the economical conditions of existence of vour 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 in- famous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois famiJy, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this s.tate 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 chil- dren 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.

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