The Communist Manifesto
in The Western World, vol 2: from 1700 (ed W E Adams )
Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1968
Introduction
Despite its brevity and simplicity, the Manifesto of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich
Engels (1820-95) has sharply affected the course of modern history. The central theme has
exercised a profound influence even upon many individuals who opposed the Marxist
movement. Scholars rarely examine historical developments today without careful attention
to economic causation.
At the Congress of a small association known as the Communist League, in 1847, Marx and
Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete theoretical and practical party program.
The pamphlet which they composed offered a thoroughly economic interpretation of history
and heralded a new approach to human values. By applying Hegel's dialectical method to
man's past development, Marx asserted that all historical phenomena had occurred as the
result of class struggle. The historical process would culminate in a revolution and seizure of
power by the proletariat, which would lead to a final synthesis — an idyllic classless society.
How did Marx distinguish between Communists and other working-class parties? Into which
languages was the Manifesto to be translated? Why? In Marxian terms, by what means and at
the expense of which class had the bourgeoisie come to power? How did Marx characterize
the position of professionals and artists, the condi
tion of the family, and the status of women
in bourgeois society? Why did Marx claim that the bourgeoisie was the most revolutionary
class hitherto known to history? How did Marx explain colonization? According to Marx,
how had the bourgeoisie forged the weapons of its own destruction? What effect did modern
economic and productive trends have on the bourgeoisie? To what degree did Marxian views
conform to the general pattern of nineteenth-century reform?
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 exorcise this spectre: Pope and tsar, Metternich and
Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in
power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of
communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary
adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish
their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of
communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
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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.
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 colonisation of America, trade with
the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to
commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the
revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in 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 aside by the manufacturing middle
class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of
division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no
longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The
place of manufacture was taken by the giant, modern industry, the place of the industrial
middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern
bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved
the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to
communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of
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industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same
proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background
every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of
development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding
political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an
armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune; here independent urban
republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable ‘third estate’ of the monarchy (as in France);
afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute
monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great
monarchies in general — the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern
industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state,
exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing
the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal,
idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his
‘natural superiors,’ and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,
than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour,
of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the
numberless 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 honoured and looked up to
with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of
science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the
family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the
Middle Ages, which 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 revolutionising the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of
society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary,
the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and
agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations,
with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all
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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 civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw
material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are
consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants,
satisfied by the 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, even the most barbarian, nations
into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it
batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred
of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois
mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, ie
to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeois has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous
cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus
rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made
the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries
dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the
West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population,
of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised
means of production and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary
consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected
provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became
lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class
interest, one frontier and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and
more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of
nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam
navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation,
canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century
had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
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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 the existence of the entire bourgeois
society on its 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 a famine, a universal war of
devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce
seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of
subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of
society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on
the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered,
and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois
society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are
too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over
these crises? On the one hand, 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, ie capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the
proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so
long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.
These labourers, who must sell themselves 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 labour, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.
He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous,
and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a
workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his
maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore
also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness
of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery
and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases,
whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given
time, or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.
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Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great
factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are
organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command
of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois
class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the
overseer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly
this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the
more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more
modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of
women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the
working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their
age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he
receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the
landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, 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 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 individual labourers, then by the
workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the
individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the
bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves;
they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery,
they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of
the Middle Ages.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and
broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies,
this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie,
which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat
in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the
proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of
absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus
the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory
so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes
concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various
interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more
equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the
bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more
fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes
their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and
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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 places the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this
contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character,
into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And
that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways,
required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is
continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever
rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular
interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself.
Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was carried. . .
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
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....
In the conditions of the proletariat, [the social conditions no longer exist]. The proletarian is
without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with
the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the
same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of
national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind
which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests....
All 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
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of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent
strata of official society being sprung into the air....
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 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 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 overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an
existence its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state,
that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this
bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential condition for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the
formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour. Wage labour
rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose
involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to
competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of
modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the
bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces,
above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable.
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 mould 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.
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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, 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 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 by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence:
Abolition of private property....
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 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.
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 changed. It loses its class character....
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 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 property 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....
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....
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the
Communists.
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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....
The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation 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
transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole 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 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, nothing 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 a 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 legalised 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, ie of prostitution 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....
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....
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. . . 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. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state
capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation 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 the population
over the country.
IO. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour 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 organised
power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the
bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise 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 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!
