The Communism Manifesto 2
The Manifesto of the Communist Party
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Section 2
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.
First, 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.
Second, 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 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.
The immediate aim of the Communist 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.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing 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 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 private 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.
Property 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 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.
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 in bare existence
as a labourer. What, therefore, 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 away 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 accumulated 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 bourgeois abolition of individuality
and freedom, and rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence,
and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
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 disappears
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 Middle Ages, but have no meaning when compared
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 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 nonexistence 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 nonexistence 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. From the moment when labour can no longer be converted
into capital, money or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, 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 for sheer idleness, for those of its members who work acquire
nothing and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection was
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 appropriating material products have, in the same way, been urged against the communistic
modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the bourgeois the disappearance
of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of
class culture is to him identical with the disappearance 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,
etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production
and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a
law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical
conditions of existence of your 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 infamous proposal of the communists. 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. But you will
say we destroy the most hallowed of relations when we replace home education by social,
and your education is not that also social and determined by the social conditions under
which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools
etc. The communists have not invented the intervention of society in education. They
do but seek to alter the character of that intervention and to rescue education from
the influence of the ruling class. 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 was introduced 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 no
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 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 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 and 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, i.e. of prostitution both public and private.
The communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.
The working men 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. National differences and antagonisms between
people are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie,
to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and
the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause
them to vanish still faster. United action of the leading civilised countries at least
is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
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. The charges against communism, made from a religious, a philosophical and,
generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in
one word man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material
existence, in his social relations and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes
its character and proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age,
have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact that,
within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution
of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity.
When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society
fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty
and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the
domain of knowledge. Undoubtedly, it will be said, religious, moral, philosophical and
juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development, but religion,
morality, philosophy, political science and law constantly survived this change.
There are besides eternal truths, such as freedom, justice, etc., that are common to
all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion
and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis. It therefore acts in
contradiction to all past historical experience.
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted
in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But, whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz. the
exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness
of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain
common forms or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance
of class antagonisms. The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional
property relations. No wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional
ideas. But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism. We have seen above
that the first step in a revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat
to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its
political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise
all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organised
as the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads
on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production, by means of measures
therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of
the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order,
and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These
measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in the
most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property and land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy, progressive or gradated 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.
8. The bringing into cultivation of wastelands and the improvement of the soil generally,
in accordance with a common plan.
9. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
10. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries.
11. Gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution
of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.
Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form.
Combination of education with industrial production.
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.
