The Communist Manifesto 3
III. Socialist and Communist Literature
1. Reactionary Socialism
a. Feudal Socialism
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France
and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution
of July 1830 and in the English Reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the
hateful upstart.
Thenceforth a serious political contest was altogether out of the question. A literary
battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature, the old cries of
the Restoration period had become impossible.
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of
their own interests and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the
interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by
singing lampoons on their new master and whispering, in his ears, sinister prophecies of coming
catastrophe.
In this way arose Feudal Socialism, half Lamentation, half Lampoon, half Echo of the Past, half
Menace of the Future, at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the
bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effect, through total
incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in
front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hind-quarters
the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and Young England exhibited this spectacle. In
pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie,
the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were
quite different, and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern
proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring
of their own form of society. For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary
character of their criticism, that the chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts
to this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed which is destined
to cut up root and branch the old order of society. What they upbraid the bourgeoisie
with is not so much that it creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working
class, and in ordinary life, despite their highfalutin phrases, they stoop to pick up
the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love and honour
for traffic and wool, beetroot sugar and potato spirits. As the parson has ever gone hand
in hand with the landlord, so has clerical socialism with feudal socialism. Nothing is
easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed
against private property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in
the place of these charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life
and mother church? Christian socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates
the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
b. Petty bourgeois socialism. The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by
the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished
in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant
proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are
but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side
with the rising bourgeoisie. In countries where modern civilisation has become fully
developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat
and bourgeoisie and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society.
The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the
proletariat by the action of competition and, as modern industry develops, they even see
the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern
society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce by overlookers, bailiffs and
shopmen. In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of
the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the
bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the
peasant and petty bourgeois and, from the standpoint of these intermediate classes,
should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty bourgeois socialism.
Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England. This school
of socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern
production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly,
the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour, the concentration of capital and
land in a few hands, over production and crises. It pointed out the inevitable ruin of the
petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production,
the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination
between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the
old nationalities. In its positive aims, however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring
the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations and
the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within
the framework of the old property relations that have been and were bound to be exploded
by those means. In either case it is both reactionary and utopian. Its last words are
corporate guilds for manufacture, patriarchal relations in agriculture. Ultimately, when
stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this
form of socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues.
c. German or True Socialism
The socialist and communist literature of France, a literature that originated under
the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expression of a struggle against
this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie in that country
had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism. German philosophers, would-be philosophers
and Beausprit eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when these writings immigrated
from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact
with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical
significance and assumed a purely literary aspect.
Thus, to the German philosophers of the 18th century, the demands of the first French revolution
were nothing more than the demands of practical reason in general, and the utterance of the
will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes the law of pure will,
of will as it was bound to be, of true human will generally.
The world of the German literate consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into
harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather in annexing the French ideas without
deserting their own philosophic point of view. This annexation took place in the same way
in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic saints over the manuscripts
on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literate reversed
this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath
the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions
of money they wrote alienation of humanity, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois
state they wrote dethronement of the category of the general, and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms
they dubbed philosophy of action, true socialism, German science of socialism, philosophical
foundation of socialism, and so on.
The French socialist and communist literature was thus completely emasculated, and, since
it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other,
he felt conscious of having overcome French one-sidedness, and of representing not true
requirements but the requirements of truth, not the interests of the proletariat but the
interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who
exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled
its poor stock and trade in such a mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic
innocence.
The fight of the German, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy
and absolute monarchy, in other words the liberal movement, became more earnest.
By this the long-wished-for opportunity was offered to true socialism, of confronting
the political movement with the socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas
against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition,
bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality,
and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose by
this bourgeois movement.
German socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo
it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding
economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the
very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and
officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with which those
same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings.
While this true socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for fighting the German
bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest
of the German philistines.
In Germany, the piti bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly
cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state
of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany.
The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain
destruction.
On the one hand, from the concentration of capital, on the other, from the rise of a
revolutionary proletariat.
True socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone.
It spread like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in a dew
of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German socialists wrapped their
sorry eternal truths, all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of
their goods amongst such a public.
And on its part, German socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic
representative of the piti bourgeois philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German piti philistine
to be the typical man.
To every villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic
interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character.
It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the brutally destructive tendency
of communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles.
With very few exceptions, all the so-called socialist and communist publications that
now, 1847, circulate in Germany, belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.
2.
Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of addressing social grievances in order to secure the continued
existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition
of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.
This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.
The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions, without the struggles
and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom.
They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating
elements.
They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.
The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best, and
bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception into various, more or less complete,
systems.
In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straight
away into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality that the proletariat should
remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas
concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second and more practical, but less systematic form of this socialism sought to depreciate
every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere
political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence in economic
relations, could be of any advantage to them.
By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of socialism, however, by no means
understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected
only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these
relations.
Reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour,
but at best lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government.
Bourgeois socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure
of speech.
Free trade for the benefit of the working class, protective duties for the benefit of
the working class, prison reform for the benefit of the working class.
This is the last word, and the only seriously meant word, of bourgeois socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase, the bourgeois is a bourgeois, for the benefit of the working
class.
3. Critical, Utopian Socialism and Communism
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always
given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babouf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal
excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed.
Owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of
the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and
could be produced, by the impending bourgeois epoch alone, the revolutionary literature
that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had, necessarily, a reactionary
character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
The socialist and communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier,
Owen and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above,
of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. See section 1, Bourgeois and Proletarians.
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action
of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet
in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative
or any independent political movement. Since the development of class antagonism keeps
even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does
not, as yet, offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They,
therefore, search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create
these conditions. Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action,
historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous
class organisation of the proletariat to the organisation of society specially contrived
by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda
and the practical carrying out of their social plans. In the formation of their plans, they
are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering
class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat
exist for them. The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings,
causes socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms.
They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured.
Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class, nay,
by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their
condition, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action. They wish to attain
their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to
failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is
still in a very undeveloped state, and has but a fantastic conception of its own position,
correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction
of society. But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical element.
They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable
materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in
them, such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of
the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system,
the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the state into a mere
superintendence of production. All these proposals point solely to the disappearance
of class antagonisms which were, at the time, only just cropping up, and which, in these
publications, are recognised in their earliest, indistinct and undefined forms only.
These proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian character. The significance of critical
utopian socialism and communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion
as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing
apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical
justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary,
their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by
the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development
of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class
struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation
of their social utopias, of founding isolated phalanstères, of establishing home colonies,
of setting up a little-like area, duodecimo additions of the New Jerusalem, and to realise
all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the
bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative socialists
depicted above, differing from these only by a more systematic pedantry, and by their
fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class. Such
action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.
The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists
and the Reformists.
Section 4. Position of the Communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties.
Section 2 has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working class
parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of
the momentary interests of the working class, but in the movement of the present they also
represent and take care of the future of that movement.
In France, the Communists ally themselves with the Social Democrats against the conservative
and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in
regard to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the Great Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this
party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of democratic socialists in the French sense,
partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition
for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Krakow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way against
the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest
possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order
that the German workers may straight away use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie,
the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along
with its supremacy.
And in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the
bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the
eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions
of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England
was in the 17th and of France in the 18th century, and because the bourgeois revolution
in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
In short, the communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing
social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the
property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of
all countries.
The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of
all existing social conditions.
Yet the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.
Working men of all countries unite!
The end of the manifesto of the communist party.
