The Communist Manifesto By Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and FriedrichEngelsTranscribed by Allen Lutins with assistance from Jim Tarzia.MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY-------------------------------[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of Communism.All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance toexorcise 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 asCommunistic by its opponents in power? Where the Oppositionthat has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism,against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as againstits reactionary adversaries?Two things result from this fact.page 1 / 58

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powersto be itself a Power.II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in theface of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, theirtendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre ofCommunism with a Manifesto of the party itself.To this end, Communists of various nationalities haveassembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to bepublished in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish andDanish languages.I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANSThe history of all hitherto existing societies is the historyof 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 anuninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each timeended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society atlarge, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.page 2 / 58

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere acomplicated arrangement of society into various orders, amanifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we havepatricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages,feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinategradations.The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruinsof feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. Ithas but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, theepoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctivefeature: it has simplified the class antagonisms: Society as awhole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps,into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisieand Proletariat.From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghersof the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elementsof the bourgeoisie were developed.The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened upfresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian andChinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with thepage 3 / 58

colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and incommodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, toindustry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to therevolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapiddevelopment.The feudal system of industry, under which industrial productionwas monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for thegrowing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system tookits place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by themanufacturing middle class; division of labour between thedifferent corporate guilds vanished in the face of division oflabour in each single workshop.Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising.Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam andmachinery revolutionised industrial production. The place ofmanufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place ofthe industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, theleaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.Modern industry has established the world-market, for which thediscovery of America paved the way. This market has given animmense development to commerce, to navigation, to communicationby land. This development has, in its time, reacted on theextension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce,page 4 / 58

navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion thebourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into thebackground every class handed down from the Middle Ages.We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself theproduct of a long course of development, of a series ofrevolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompaniedby a corresponding political advance of that class. Anoppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armedand self-governing association in the mediaeval commune; hereindependent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), theretaxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France),afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving eitherthe semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoiseagainst the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the greatmonarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since theestablishment 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 isbut a committee for managing the common affairs of the wholebourgeoisie.The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionarypart.page 5 / 58

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put anend to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It haspitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man tohis "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexusbetween man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cashpayment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies ofreligious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistinesentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. Ithas resolved personal worth into exchange value. And in place ofthe numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up thatsingle, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, forexploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked,shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupationhitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It hasconverted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, theman of science, into its paid wage labourers.The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimentalveil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere moneyrelation.The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that thebrutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionistspage 6 / 58

so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothfulindolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity canbring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptianpyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it hasconducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exodusesof nations and crusades.The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionisingthe instruments of production, and thereby the relations ofproduction, 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 allearlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising ofproduction, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeoisepoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations,with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices andopinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquatedbefore they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, allthat is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to facewith sober senses, his real conditions of life, and hisrelations with his kind.The need of a constantly expanding market for its productschases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. Itmust nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexionseverywhere.page 7 / 58

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-marketgiven a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption inevery country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it hasdrawn from under the feet of industry the national ground onwhich it stood. All old-established national industries havebeen destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodgedby new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and deathquestion for all civilised nations, by industries that no longerwork up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from theremotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not onlyat home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the oldwants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find newwants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distantlands and climes. In place of the old local and nationalseclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in everydirection, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as inmaterial, so also in intellectual production. The intellectualcreations of individual nations become common property. Nationalone-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and moreimpossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures,there arises a world literature.The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments ofproduction, 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 withpage 8 / 58

which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces thebarbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners tocapitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, toadopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them tointroduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., tobecome bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a worldafter its own image.The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of thetowns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased theurban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescueda considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rurallife. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, soit has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent onthe civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois,the East on the West.The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with thescattered state of the population, of the means of production,and of property. It has agglomerated production, and hasconcentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequenceof this was political centralisation. Independent, or butloosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws,governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together intoone nation, with one government, one code of laws, one nationalclass-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. Thebourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, haspage 9 / 58