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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...
Manifesto of the Communist PartyA '''free market''' spectre is a term in [[economics]] that refers to an economy operating with little to no interference on haunting Europe – the part spectre of a governmentcommunism. The central pillar All the powers of free market economy old Europe haveentered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot,French Radicals and German police-spies.Where is voluntary exchanges without the use party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents inpower? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of any kind of coercion or violence.<ref>[httpcommunism,against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?Two things result from this fact://wwwI.econlibCommunism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself apower.org/library/Enc/FreeMarketII.html Free Market]It is high time that Communists should openly, ''Concise Encyclopedia in the face of Economics''</ref> This type the whole world,publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of economic philosophy is the backbone to the system Spectre of [[capitalism]]Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and is sometimes referred to by sketched the [[French]] phrase "[[laissez-faire]]following manifesto," meaning to "let bepublished in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danishlanguages." Free markets are largely dependent on I. Bourgeois and Proletarians*The history of all hitherto existing society† is the process history of [[supply class struggles.Freeman and demand]]slave, where prices are determined by patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in aword, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on anuninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionaryreconstitution of society at large, or in the amount common ruin of the product in contending classes.In the marketearlier epochs of history, as well as we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of societyinto various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians,knights, plebeians, slaves; in the number Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,apprentices, serfs; in almost all of consumers who wish to purchase that productthese classes, again, subordinate gradations. The market will punish businesses whose practices are modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not beneficial, as consumers will take their business elsewheredoneaway with class antagonisms. [[Communism]] and [[socialism]] are the antithesis It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,new forms of struggle in place of the '''free market'''old ones.
The opposite * By bourgeoisie is meant the class of a free market modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers ofwage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, arereduced to selling their labour power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]† That is a command system, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recordedhistory, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in which Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the government regulates social foundation from which all businesses for Teutonic races started in history,and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere fromIndia to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, byLewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. Withthe theoretical central planning dissolution of the economyprimeval communities, although this has been shown society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonisticclasses. I have negative effectsattempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, secondedition, Stuttgart, 1886. Economist [[Friedrich HayekEngels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]] warned however ‡ Guild-master, that is, a full member of mixing a [[planned economy]] with guild, a competitive economymaster within, "not a mixture head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition] 15 Manifesto of the Communist PartyOur epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it hassimplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two means that neither will workgreathostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." <ref>Friedrich AFrom the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. HayekFrom theseburgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.The discovery of America, [http://wwwthe rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the risingbourgeoisie.ieaThe East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with thecolonies, 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 revolutionaryelement in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.orgThe 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.uk/files/upldThe manufacturing systemtook its place. The guild-publication43pdf?masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class;division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labourin each single workshop.pdf ''Road Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longersufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place ofmanufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class byindustrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved theway. This market has given an immense development to Serfdom''commerce,] Reader's Digest Condensed Versionto navigation, April 1945tocommunication by land. This development has, pgin its turn, reacted on the extension of industry;and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportionthe bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every classhanded down from the Middle Ages. 38We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course ofdevelopment, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.</ref>Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding politicaladvance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed andself-governing association in the medieval commune*: here independent urban republic (as inItaly and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in theperiod of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as acounterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, thebourgeoisie 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 executiveof the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the wholebourgeoisie.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 remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious
A ''* This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased orconquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition] “Commune”was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masterslocal self-government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economical development ofthe bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [mixed economyEngels, 1888English Edition]]'' contains both private16 Manifesto of the Communist Partyfervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotisticalcalculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberlessindefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. Inone 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 withreverent 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 familyrelation to a mere money relation.The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the MiddleAges, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothfulindolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplishedwonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it hasconducted 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 firstcondition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production,uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitationdistinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-owned frozen relations, with theirtrain of ancient and statevenerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-owned enterprises formed onesbecome antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy isprofaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and hisrelations with his kind.The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entiresurface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexionseverywhere.The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan characterto production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it hasdrawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-establishednational industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by newindustries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, byindustries that combines elements no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from theremotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarterof capitalism the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find newwants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and socialismclimes. In place of the oldlocal and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universalinter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectualcreations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and localliteratures, there arises a world literature.The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immenselyfacilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinesewalls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. Itcompels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compelsthem to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.In one word, it creates a world after its own image. 17 Manifesto of the Communist PartyThe bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities,has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued aconsiderable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the countrydependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on thecivilised 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, ofthe means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the meansof production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of thiswas political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separateinterests, 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 onecustoms-tariff.The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and morecolossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’sforces 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 mix presentiment thatsuch productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie builtitself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these meansof production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced andexchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, thefeudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productiveforces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitutionadapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with itsrelations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such giganticmeans of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control thepowers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past thehistory of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forcesagainst modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions forthe existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises thatby their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each timemore threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of thepreviously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks outan epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appearsas if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means ofsubsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too muchcivilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. Theproductive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of theconditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for theseconditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bringdisorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. Theconditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And howdoes the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass ofproductive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thoroughexploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and moredestructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. 18 Manifesto of the Communist PartyThe weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned againstthe bourgeoisie itself.But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also calledinto existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – theproletarians.In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is theproletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long asthey 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, andare consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of themarket economy .Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of theproletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. Hebecomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, andmost easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman isrestricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and forthe propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal toits cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, thewage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labourincreases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of theworking hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed ofmachinery, etc.Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factoryof the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised likesoldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command economyof a perfecthierarchy of officers and sergeants. For Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of thebourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, aboveall, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaimsgain 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 moremodern 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 hereceives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, thelandlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.The lower strata of the middle class – the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmengenerally, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partlybecause their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry iscarried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because theirspecialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat isrecruited from all classes of the population.The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle withthe bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeopleof a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeoiswho directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions ofproduction, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported waresthat compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, theyseek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages. 19 Manifesto of the Communist PartyAt this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, andbroken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, thisis not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, whichclass, 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 fighttheir enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, thelandowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historicalmovement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victoryfor the bourgeoisie.But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomesconcentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The variousinterests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, inproportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduceswages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resultingcommercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasingimprovement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and moreprecarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more andmore the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to formcombinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up therate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for theseoccasional 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 helpedon by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that placethe workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that wasneeded to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one nationalstruggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attainwhich the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, themodern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, iscontinually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it everrises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interestsof the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the tenhours’ bill in England was carried.Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course ofdevelopment of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At firstwith the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests havebecome antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreigncountries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help,and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies theproletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishesthe proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance ofindustry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence.These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution goingon 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 therevolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier 20 Manifesto of the Communist Partyperiod, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisiegoes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who haveraised 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 areally revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of ModernIndustry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all thesefight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middleclass. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, forthey try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so inview of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but theirfuture interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrownoff by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by aproletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribedtool of reactionary intrigue.In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. Theproletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything incommon with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection tocapital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of everytrace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices,behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status bysubjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot becomemasters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode ofappropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing oftheir own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, andinsurances of, individual property.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 of our present society,cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official societybeing sprung into the air.Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at firsta national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters withits own bourgeoisie.In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more orless veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out intoopen revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for thesway of the proletariat.Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism ofoppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must beassured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period ofserfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under theyoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on thecontrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below theconditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops morerapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit anylonger to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as 21 Manifesto of the Communist Partyan over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slavewithin 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, itsexistence is no longer compatible with society.The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formationand augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour restsexclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntarypromoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by therevolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore,cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriatesproducts. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its falland the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. II. Proletarians and CommunistsIn what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the 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 theproletarian movement.The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In thenational struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to thefront the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In thevarious stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie hasto 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 resolutesection of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward allothers; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat theadvantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate generalresults of the proletarian movement.The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties:formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest ofpolitical power by the proletariat.The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles thathave 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 propertyrelations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequentupon 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 UK abolition of property generally, but theabolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and mostcomplete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on classantagonisms, 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: Abolitionof private property.We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personallyacquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be thegroundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and ofthe small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need toabolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is stilldestroying it daily.Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., thatkind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition ofbegetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is 23 Chapter II: Proletarians and Communistsbased on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of thisantagonism.To be a capitalist, is said to have not only a free market economy purely personal, but a social status in almost production. Capitalis a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort,only by the united action of all goods members of society, can it be set in motion.Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members ofsociety, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the socialcharacter 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 ofsubsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer.What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices toprolong and services reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personalappropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance andreproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour ofothers. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, underwhich the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as theinterest of the ruling class requires it.In bourgeois society, living labour is but retains a bureaucratic socialised healthcare regimemeans to increase accumulated labour. In Communistsociety, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of thelabourer.In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the presentdominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while theliving person is dependent and has no individuality.And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality andfreedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, andbourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, freeselling and buying.But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about freeselling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general,have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fetteredtraders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition ofbuying 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 justified already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for thefew 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 whoseexistence 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 isjust what we intend.From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into asocial power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property canno longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say,individuality vanishes. 24 Chapter II: Proletarians and CommunistsYou 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, andmade impossible.Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it doesis to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universallaziness will overtake us.According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheeridleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything donot work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can nolonger be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating materialproducts, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic mode of producing andappropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class propertyis the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identicalwith the disappearance of all culture.That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act asa machine.But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property,the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but theoutgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as yourjurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential characterand 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 youshare with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancientproperty, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit inthe case of your own bourgeois form of property.Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal ofthe Communists.On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on privategain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the grounds bourgeoisie. But thisstate 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 bothwill vanish with the vanishing of capital.Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crimewe plead guilty.But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education bysocial.And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under whichyou educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? TheCommunists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alterthe character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parentsand child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the 25 Chapter II: Proletarians and Communistsfamily ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simplearticles of commerce and instruments of labour.But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments ofproduction are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion thatthe 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 asmere instruments of production.For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at thecommunity of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by theCommunists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existedalmost from time immemorial.Our bourgeois, not content with having 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 theCommunists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution fora hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is selfevident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition ofthe 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 theproletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of thenation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeoissense of the word.National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owingto the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, touniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.The supremacy of the proletariat will ensure cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of theleading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of theproletariat.In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, theexploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonismbetween classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to anend.The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from anideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that British subjects man’s ideas, views, and conception, in oneword, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his materialexistence, in his social relations and in his social life?What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its characterin proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have access ever been theideas of its ruling class.When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that fact thatwithin the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of theold 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 byChristianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to health care rationalist ideas, feudal 26 Chapter II: Proletarians and Communistssociety fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religiousliberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition withinthe domain of knowledge.“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have beenmodified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, politicalscience, and law, constantly survived this change.”“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states ofsociety. 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 historicalexperience.”What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in thedevelopment 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 exploitationof 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 generalideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.The Communist revolution is supported out the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; nowonder that its development involved 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 the revolution by the working class is to raise theproletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from thebourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of theproletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly aspossible.Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on therights 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 themovement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and areunavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to publicpurposes.2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state coffers, by means of a national bankwith State capital and an exclusive monopoly.6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of theState.7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; thebringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generallyin accordance with a common plan.8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially foragriculture.9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition ofall the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the 27 Chapter II: Proletarians and Communistspopulace over the country.10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’sfactory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrialproduction, &c, &c.When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production hasbeen concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power willlose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power ofone class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie iscompelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of arevolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditionsof production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for theexistence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its ownsupremacy as a class.In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have anassociation, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development ofall. III. Socialist and Communist Literature1. Reactionary SocialismA. Feudal SocialismOwing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France andEngland to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July1830, and in the English reform agitation4, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hatefulupstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literarybattle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restorationperiod had become impossible.*
In an interview on [[PBS]]order to arouse sympathy, libertarian economist [[Milton Friedman]] saidthe aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its owninterests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploitedworking class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their newmasters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.In this way arose feudal Socialism: "half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, halfmenace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisieto the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehendthe march of modern history.The most important single central fact about aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit"banner.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://wwwBut the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coatsof arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.pbsOne section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited this spectacle.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_miltonfriedmanIn pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, thefeudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite differentand that are now antiquated.html |title=Commanding Heights: Interview In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat neverexisted, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form ofsociety.For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chiefaccusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois régime a class is beingdeveloped which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with Milton Friedman |work=[[PBS]] |date=October 1is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it createsa revolutionary proletariat.In political practice, 2000 }}</ref>therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and inordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples droppedfrom the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar,and potato spirits.†
==See also==As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with* [[Austrian economics]]* [[Gerrymandering]]Feudal Socialism.
==External links==* Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830). [https://wwwNote by Engels to the Englishedition of 1888.youtube]† This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estatescultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillersof potato spirits.com/watch?v=tNdPrJySGdA The Prager University about Free Market Moralitywealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up fordeclining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock companies. [Note by Engels to theEnglish edition of 1888.]29 Chapter III: Socialist and Communist LiteratureNothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianitydeclaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in theplace of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life andMother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates theheart-burnings of the aristocrat.B. Petty-Bourgeois SocialismThe feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the onlyclass whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeoissociety. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of themodern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially andcommercially, 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 pettybourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewingitself 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 completelydisappear 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 wasnatural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in theircriticism of the bourgeois régime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from thestandpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thusarose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France butalso in England.This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions ofmodern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved,incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration ofcapital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of thepetty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the cryinginequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, thedissolution 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 ofproduction and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or tocramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the oldproperty 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” SocialismThe Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressureof a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, wasintroduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun itscontest with feudal absolutism.German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seizedon this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France intoGermany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German 30 Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literaturesocial conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed apurely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the demandsof the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of “Practical Reason” ingeneral, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in theireyes, the laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally.The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmonywith their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas withoutdeserting 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 onwhich the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversedthis process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneaththe French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions ofmoney, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity”, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeoisstate 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 itceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he feltconscious 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 HumanNature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the mistyrealm of philosophical fantasy.This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled itspoor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedanticinnocence.The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracyand 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 thepolitical movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas againstliberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedomof the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the massesthat they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. GermanSocialism 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 economicconditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things thoseattainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires, andofficials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with which these samegovernments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings.While this “True” Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the Germanbourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of GermanPhilistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since thenconstantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social basis of the existing stateof things. 31 Chapter III: Socialist and Communist LiteratureTo preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial andpolitical 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 the dew ofsickly 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 amongstsuch a public.And on its part German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombasticrepresentative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be thetypical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialisticinterpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directlyopposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme andimpartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist andCommunist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this fouland enervating literature.*
==References==2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism<references/>A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure thecontinued existence of bourgeois society.To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition ofthe working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty toanimals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form ofsocialism 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 thestruggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society,minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without aproletariat. 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 completesystems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightwayinto the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain withinthe bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning thebourgeoisie.A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciateevery revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere politicalreform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, couldbe of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form ofSocialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production,an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on thecontinued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relationsbetween capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work,of bourgeois government.
{{Conservatism}}*{{Economic preparedness topics}} The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire todabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical type of this tendency is Mr Karl Gruen. [Note by Engels tothe German edition of 1890.] 32 Chapter III: Socialist and Communist LiteratureBourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figureof speech.Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the workingclass. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the onlyseriously 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 CommunismWe do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always givenvoice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universalexcitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the thenundeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for itsemancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impendingbourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements ofthe proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism andsocial 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 strugglebetween proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section I. Bourgeois and Proletarians).The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of thedecomposing 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 politicalmovement.Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, theeconomic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for theemancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new sociallaws, that are to create these conditions.Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions ofemancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariatto an organisation of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolvesitself, 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 theworking class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the mostsuffering class does the proletariat exist for them.The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialistsof this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improvethe condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habituallyappeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class.For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possibleplan of the best possible state of society?Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain theirends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave theway for the new social Gospel.Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a veryundeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the firstinstinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society. 33 Chapter III: Socialist and Communist LiteratureBut these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack everyprinciple of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for theenlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them – such as theabolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on ofindustries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation ofsocial harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more superintendence ofproduction – all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms whichwere, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in theirearliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopiancharacter.The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation tohistorical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definiteshape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practicalvalue and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were,in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionarysects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressivehistorical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, todeaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimentalrealisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres”, of establishing “HomeColonies”, or setting up a “Little Icaria”* – duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem – and torealise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of thebourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary [or] conservative Socialistsdepicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical andsuperstitious 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 theRéformistes.
* Phalanstéres were Socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his Utopiaand, later on, to his American Communist colony. [[Category:Economic PreparednessNote by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]“Home Colonies” were what Owen called his Communist model societies. Phalanstéres was the name of the publicpalaces planned by Fourier. Icaria was the name given to the Utopian land of fancy, whose Communist institutionsCabet portrayed. [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890.]IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to theVarious Existing Opposition PartiesSection II 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 themomentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also representand take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the SocialDemocrats* against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to takeup a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the greatRevolution.In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consistsof antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radicalbourgeois.In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition fornational emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against theabsolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possiblerecognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that theGerman workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the socialand 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 thebourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of abourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of Europeancivilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in theseventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution inGermany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existingsocial and political order of things.In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the propertyquestion, no matter what its degree of development at the time.Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of allcountries.The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends canbe attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classestremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. Theyhave a world to win.Working Men of All Countries, Unite!5
* The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc, in the dailypress by the Réforme. The name of Social-Democracy signifies, with these its inventors, a section ofthe Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with socialism. [Engels, English Edition1888] Letter from Engels to Marx, 24 November 1847*Paris, 23-24 November 1847Dear Marx,Not until this evening was it decided that I should be coming. Saturday evening, then, in Ostend,Hôtel de la Couronne, just opposite the railway station beside the harbour, and Sunday morningacross the water. If you take the train that leaves between 4 and 5, you’ll arrive at about thesame time as I do. ...Tuesday eveningVerte [Category:EconomicsPTO]Give a little thought to the “Confession of Faith.” I think we would do best to abandon thecatechetical form and call the thing “Communist Manifesto.” Since a certain amount of historyhas to be narrated in it, the form hitherto adopted is quite unsuitable. I shall be bringing with methe one from here, which I did [“Principles of Communism”]; it is in simple narrative form, butwretchedly worded, in a tearing hurry. I start off by asking: What is communism? and thenstraight on to the proletariat – the history of its origins, how it differs from earlier workers,development of the antithesis between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, crises, conclusions. Inbetween, all kinds of secondary matter and, finally, the communists’ party policy, in so far as itshould be made public. The one here has not yet been submitted in its entirety for endorsementbut, save for a few quite minor points, I think I can get it through in such a form that at least thereis nothing in it which conflicts with our views. ... * From MECW Volume 38, p. 146; Written: 24 November 1847; First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F.Engels und K. Marx, 1913. Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith*This document is the draft programme discussed at the First Congress of the Communist League inLondon on June 2-9, 1847.The Congress was a final stage in the reorganisation of the League of the Just – an organisation ofGerman workers and craftsmen, which was founded in Paris in 1836-37 and soon acquired aninternational character, having communities in Germany, France, Switzerland, Britain and Sweden.The activity of Marx and Engels directed towards the ideological and organisational unity of thesocialists and advanced workers prompted the leaders of the League (Karl Schapper, Joseph Moll,Heinrich Bauer), who resided in London front November 1846, to ask for their help in reorganisingthe League and drafting its new program me. When Marx and Engels were convinced that the leadersof the League of the Just were ready to accept the principles of scientific communism as itsprogramme they accepted the offer to join the League made to them late in January 1847.Engels’ active participation in the work of the Congress (Marx was unable to go to London) affectedthe course and the results of its proceedings. The League was renamed the Communist League, the oldmotto of the League of the Just “All men are brothers” was replaced by a new, Marxist one: “WorkingMen of All Countries, Unite! “ The draft programme and the draft Rules of the League were approvedat the last sitting on June 9, 1847.The full text of the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” (Credo) became known only in 1968.It was found by the Swiss scholar Bert Andréas together with the draft Rules and the circular of theFirst Congress to the members of the League in the archives of Joachim Friedrich Martens, an activemember of the Communist League, which are kept in the State and University Library in Hamburg.This discovery made it possible to ascertain a number of important points in the history of theCommunist League and the drafting of its programme documents. It had been previously assumed thatthe First Congress did no more than adopt a decision to draw up a programme and that the draft itselfwas made by the London Central Authority of the Communist League (Joseph Moll, Karl Schapperand Heinrich Bauer) after the Congress between June and August 1847. The new documents show thatthe draft was ready by June 9, 1847 and that its author was Engels (the manuscript found in Martens’archives, with the exception of some inserted words, the concluding sentence and the signatures of thepresident and the secretary of the Congress, was written in Engels’ hand).The document testifies to Engels’ great influence on the discussion of the programme at the Congress– the formulation of the answers to most of the questions is a Marxist one. Besides, while drafting theprogramme, Engels had to take into account that the members of the League had not yet freedthemselves from the influence of utopian ideas and this was reflected in the formulation of the first sixquestions and answers. The form of a “revolutionary catechism” was also commonly used in theLeague of the Just and other organisations of workers and craftsmen at the time. It may he assumedthat Engels intended to give greater precision to some of the formulations of the programme documentin the course of further discussion and revision.After the First Congress of the Communist League, the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith”was sent, together with the draft Rules, to the communities for discussion, the results of which were tobe taken into account at the time of the final approval of the programme and the Rules at the SecondCongress. When working on another, improved draft programme, the Principles of Communism, inlate October 1847, Engels made direct use of the “Confession of Faith”, as can be seen from thecoincidences of the texts, and also from references in the Principles to the earlier document whenEngels had apparently decided to leave formulations of some of the answers as they were. * From MECW Volume 6, p. 92; written by Engels, June 9 1847; first published in Gründungsdokumente des Bundesder Kommunisten, Hamburg, 1969, in English in Birth of the Communist Manifesto, International Publishers, 1971. 37 Draft of a Communist Confession of FaithA Communist Confession of FaithQuestion 1: Are you a Communist?Answer: Yes.Question 2: What is the aim of the Communists?Answer: To organise society in such a way that every member of it can developand use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without therebyinfringing the basic conditions of this society.Question 3: How do you wish to achieve this aim?Answer: By the elimination of private property and its replacement by communityof property.Question 4: On what do you base your community of property?Answer: Firstly, on the mass of productive forces and means of subsistenceresulting from the development of industry, agriculture, trade and colonisation,and on the possibility inherent in machinery, chemical and other resources of theirinfinite extension.Secondly, on the fact that in the consciousness or feeling of every individual thereexist certain irrefutable basic principles which, being the result of the whole ofhistorical development, require no proof.Question 5: What are such principles?Answer: For example, every individual strives to be happy. The happiness of theindividual is inseparable from the happiness of all, etc.Question 6: How do you wish to prepare the way for your community of property?Answer: By enlightening and uniting the proletariat.Question 7: What is the proletariat?Answer: The proletariat is that class of society which lives exclusively by itslabour and not on the profit from any kind of capital; that class whose weal andwoe, whose life and death, therefore, depend on the alternation of times of goodand bad business;. in a word, on the fluctuations of competition.Question 8: Then there have not always been proletarians?Answer: No. There have always been poor and working classes; and those whoworked were almost always the poor. But there have not always been proletarians,just as competition has not always been free.Question 9: How did the proletariat arise?Answer: The proletariat came into being as a result of the introduction of themachines which have been invented since the middle of the last century and themost important of which are: the steam-engine, the spinning machine and thepower loom. These machines, which were very expensive and could thereforeonly be purchased by rich people, supplanted the workers of the time, because bythe use of machinery it was possible to produce commodities more quickly andcheaply than could the workers with their imperfect spinning wheels and handlooms. The machines thus delivered industry entirely into the hands of the bigcapitalists and rendered the workers’ scanty property which consisted mainly oftheir tools, looms, etc., quite worthless, so that the capitalist was left witheverything, the worker with nothing. In this way the factory system was 38 Draft of a Communist Confession of Faithintroduced. Once the capitalists saw how advantageous this was for them, theysought to extend it to more and more branches of labour. They divided work moreand more between the workers so that workers who formerly had made a wholearticle now produced only a part of it. Labour simplified in this way producedgoods more quickly and therefore more cheaply and only now was it found inalmost every branch of labour that here also machines could be used. As soon asany branch of labour went over to factory production it ended up, just as in thecase of spinning and weaving. in the hands of the big capitalists, and the workerswere deprived of the last remnants of their independence. We have graduallyarrived at the position where almost all branches of labour are run on a factorybasis. This has increasingly brought about the ruin of the previously existingmiddle class, especially of the small master craftsmen, completely transformed theprevious position of the workers, and two new classes which are graduallyswallowing up all other classes have come into being, namely:I. The, class of the big capitalists, who in all advanced countries are in almostexclusive possession of the means of subsistence and those means (machines,factories, workshops, etc.) by which these means of subsistence are produced.This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.II. The class of the completely propertyless, who are compelled to sell their labourto the first class, the bourgeois, simply to obtain from them in return their meansof subsistence. Since the parties to this trading in labour are not equal, but thebourgeois have the advantage, the propertyless must submit to the bad conditionslaid down by the bourgeois. This class, dependent on the bourgeois, is called theclass of the proletarians or the proletariat.Question 10: In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave?Answer: The slave is sold once and for all, the proletarian has to sell himself bythe day and by the hour. The slave is the property of one master and for that veryreason has a guaranteed subsistence, however wretched it may be. The proletarianis, so to speak, the slave of the entire bourgeois class, not of one master, andtherefore has no guaranteed subsistence, since nobody buys his labour if he doesnot need it. The slave is accounted a thing and not a member of civil society. Theproletarian is recognised as a person, as a member of civil society. The slave may,therefore, have a better subsistence than the proletarian but the latter stands at ahigher stage of development. The slave frees himself by becoming a proletarian,abolishing from the totality of property relationships only the relationship ofslavery. The proletarian can free himself only by abolishing property in general.Question 11: In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf?Answer: The serf has the use of a piece of land, that is, of an instrument ofproduction, in return for handing over a greater or lesser portion of the yield. Theproletarian works with instruments of production which belong to someone elsewho, in return for his labour, hands over to him a portion, determined bycompetition, of the products. In the case of the serf, the share of the labourer isdetermined by his own labour, that is, by himself. In the case of the proletarian itis determined by competition, therefore in the first place by the bourgeois. Theserf has guaranteed subsistence, the proletarian has not. The serf frees himself bydriving out his feudal lord and becoming a property owner himself, thus enteringinto competition and joining for the time being the possessing class, the privilegedclass. The proletarian frees himself by doing away with property, competition, andall class differences. 39 Draft of a Communist Confession of FaithQuestion 12: In what way does the proletarian differ from the handicraftsman?Answer: As opposed to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, who stillexisted nearly everywhere during the last century and still exists here and there, isat most a temporary proletarian. His aim is to acquire capital himself and so toexploit other workers. He can often achieve this aim where the craft guilds stillexist or where freedom to follow a trade has not yet led to the organisation ofhandwork on a factory basis and to intense competition. But as soon as the factorysystem is introduced into handwork and competition is in full swing, this prospectis eliminated and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. Thehandicraftsman therefore frees himself either by becoming a bourgeois or ingeneral passing over into the middle class, or, by becoming a proletarian as aresult of competition (as now happens in most cases) and joining the movement ofthe proletariat – i. e., the more or less conscious communist movement.Question 13: Then you do not believe that community of property has been possible at any time?Answer: No. Communism has only arisen since machinery and other inventionsmade it possible to hold out the prospect of an all-sided development, a happyexistence, for all members of society. Communism is the theory of a liberationwhich was not possible for the slaves, the serfs, or the handicraftsmen, but onlyfor the proletarians and hence it belongs of necessity to the 19th century and wasnot possible in any earlier period.Question 14: Let m go back to the sixth question. As you wish to prepare for community ofproperty by the enlightening and uniting of the proletariat, then you reject revolution?Answer: We are convinced not only of the uselessness but even of theharmfulness of all conspiracies. We are also aware that revolutions are not madedeliberately and arbitrarily but that everywhere and at all times they are thenecessary consequence of circumstances which are not in any way whateverdependent either on the will or on the leadership of individual parties or of wholeclasses. But we also see that the development of the proletariat in almost allcountries of the world is forcibly repressed by the possessing classes and that thusa revolution is being forcibly worked for by the opponents of communism. If, inthe end, the oppressed proletariat is thus driven into a revolution, then we willdefend the cause of the proletariat just as well by our deeds as now by our words.Question 15: Do you intend to replace the existing social order by community of Property at onestroke?Answer: We have no such intention. The development of the masses cannot heordered by decree. It is determined by the development of the conditions in whichthese masses live, and therefore proceeds gradually.Question 16: How do you think the transition from the present situation to community ofProperty is to be effected?Answer: The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community ofproperty is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democraticconstitution.Question 17: What will be your first measure once you have established democracy?Answer: Guaranteeing the subsistence of the proletariat.Question 18: How will you do this?40 Draft of a Communist Confession of FaithAnswer. I. By limiting private property in such a way that it gradually preparesthe way for its transformation into social property, e. g., by progressive taxation,limitation of the right of inheritance in favour of the state, etc., etc.II. By employing workers in national workshops and factories and on nationalestates.III. By educating all children at the expense of the state.Question 19: How will you arrange this kind of education during the period of transition?Answer: All children will be educated in state establishments from the time whenthey can do without the first maternal care.Question 20: Will not the introduction of community of property be accompanied by theproclamation of the community of women?Answer: By no means. We will only interfere in the personal relationship betweenmen and women or with the family in general to the extent that the maintenance ofthe existing institution would disturb the new social order. Besides, we are wellaware that the family relationship has been modified in the course of history bythe property relationships and by periods of development, and that consequentlythe ending of private property will also have a most important influence on it.Question 21: Will nationalities continue to exist under communism?Answer: The nationalities of the peoples who join together according to theprinciple of community will be just as much compelled by this union to mergewith one another and thereby supersede themselves as the various differencesbetween estates and classes disappear through the superseding of their basis –private property.Question 22. Do Communists reject existing religions?Answer: All religions which have existed hitherto were expressions of historicalstages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. Butcommunism is that stage of historical development which makes all existingreligions superfluous and supersedes them.In the name and on the mandate of the Congress.Secretary: Heide [Alias of Wilhelm Wolff in the League of the Just]President: Karl Schill [CategoryAlias of Karl Schapper in the League of the Just]London, June 9, 1847 The Principles of Communism*In 1847 Engels wrote two draft programmes for the Communist League in the form of a catechism,one in June and the other in October. The latter, which is known as Principles of Communism, wasfirst published in 1914. The earlier document “Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith”, was onlyfound in 1968. It was first published in 1969 in Hamburg, together with four other documentspertaining to the first congress of the Communist League, in a booklet entitled Gründungs Dokumentedes Bundes der Kommunisten (Juni bis September 1847) [Founding Documents of the CommunistLeague].At the June 1847 Congress of the League of the Just, which was also the founding conference of theCommunist League, it was decided to issue a draft “confession of faith” to be submitted for discussionto the sections of the League. The document which has now come to light is almost certainly thisdraft. Comparison of the two documents shows that Principles of Communism is a revised edition ofthis earlier draft. In Principles of Communism, Engels left three questions unanswered, in two caseswith the notation “unchanged” (bleibt); this clearly refers to the answers provided in the earlier draft.The new draft for the programme was worked out by Engels on the instructions of the leading body ofthe Paris circle of the Communist League. The instructions were decided on after Engels’ sharpcriticism at the committee meeting, on October 22, 1847, of the draft programme drawn up by the“true socialist“ Moses Hess, which was then rejected.Still considering Principles of Communism as a preliminary draft, Engels expressed the view, in aletter to Marx dated November 23-24 1847, that it would be best to drop the old catechistic form anddraw up a programme in the form of a manifesto.At the second congress of the Communist League (November 29-December 8, 1847) Marx and Engelsdefended the fundamental scientific principles of communism and were trusted with drafting aprogramme in the form of a manifesto of the Communist Party. In writing the manifesto the foundersof Marxism made use of the propositions enunciated in Principles of Communism.Engels uses the term Manufaktur, and its derivatives, which have been translated “manufacture”,“manufacturing”, etc., Engels used this word literally, to indicate production by hand, not factoryproduction for which Engels uses “big industry”. Manufaktur differs from handicraft (guild productionin mediaeval towns), in that the latter was carried out by independent artisans. Manufacktur is carriedout by homeworkers working for merchant capitalists, or by groups of craftspeople working togetherin large workshops owned by capitalists. It is therefore a transitional mode of production, betweenguild (handicraft) and modern (capitalist) forms of production. * Written:AntiOctober-November 1847; Source: Selected Works, Volume One, p. 81-97, Progress Publishers, Moscow,1969; first published: 1914, by Eduard Bernstein in the German Social Democratic Party’s Vorwärts!; translated: PaulSweezy; Transcribed: Zodiac, MEA 1993; marxists.org 1999; proofed and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005.Footnotes are from the Chinese Edition of Marx/Engels Selected Works Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1977, witheditorial additions by marxists.org. 42 Draft of a Communist Confession of FaithThe Principles of Communism– 1 –What is Communism?Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.– 2 –What is the proletariat?The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does notdraw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose soleexistence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on thevagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, theworking class of the 19th century.6 – 3 –Proletarians, then, have not always existed?No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly beenpoor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they aretoday; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has alwaysbeen free unbridled competitions.– 4 –How did the proletariat originate?The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last halfof the last (18th) century, and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries ofthe world.This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinningmachines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines,which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the wholemode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaperand better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels andhandlooms. The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists andrendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.). The result wasthat the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. Thismarked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry.Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, thissystem spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing,pottery, and the metal industries.Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker whopreviously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division oflabor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of theindividual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performednot only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one afteranother, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning andweaving had already done.But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers weredeprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacturebut also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly 43 Draft of a Communist Confession of Faithdisplaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expensesand permitted an elaborate division of labor.This is how it has come about that in civilized countries at the present time nearly all kinds oflabor are performed in factories – and, in nearly all branches of work, handicrafts andmanufacture have been superseded. This process has, to an ever greater degree, ruined the oldmiddle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of theworkers; and two new classes have been created which are gradually swallowing up all the others.These are:(i) The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almostexclusive possession of all the means of subsistence and of the instruments(machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means ofsubsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.(ii) The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to thebourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for theirsupport. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.– 5 –Under what conditions does this sale of thelabor of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place?Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the samelaws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as weshall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, alwaysequal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production oflabor.But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistencenecessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dyingout. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; theprice of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for themaintenance of life.However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the workersometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as theindustrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commoditiesthan what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than hisminimum.This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which bigindustry has taken possession of all branches of production.– 6 –What working classes were there before the industrialrevolution?The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society,lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes.In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backwardcountries and even in the southern part of the United States.In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary,Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, therewere also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. 44 Draft of a Communist Confession of FaithGradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers whowere even then employed by larger capitalists.– 7 –In what way do proletarians differ from slaves?The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it maybe, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entirebourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a betterexistence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of socialdevelopment and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only therelation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only byabolishing private property in general.– 8 –In what way do proletarians differ from serfs?The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for whichhe gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor.The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other,in exchange for a part of the product.The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian hasnot. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it.The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomesa handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and therebybecomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. Inshort, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. Theproletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.– 9 –In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen?In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywherein the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at mosttemporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He canoften achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has notyet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competitionBut as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishesfully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more aproletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or enteringthe middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now moreoften the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., themore or less communist movement.7 45 Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith– 10 –In what way do proletarians differ from manufacturingworkers?The manufacturing worker of the 16th to the 18th centuries still had, with but few exception, aninstrument of production in his own possession – his loom, the family spinning wheel, a little plotof land which he cultivated in his spare time. The proletarian has none of these things.The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or lesspatriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the cityand his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation.The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whateverproperty he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.– 11 –What were the immediate consequences of the industrialrevolution and of the division of society into bourgeoisieand proletariat?First, the lower and lower prices of industrial products brought about by machine labor totallydestroyed, in all countries of the world, the old system of manufacture or industry based uponhand labor.In this way, all semi-barbarian countries, which had hitherto been more or less strangers tohistorical development, and whose industry had been based on manufacture, were violentlyforced out of their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities of the English and allowedtheir own manufacturing workers to be ruined. Countries which had known no progress forthousands of years – for example, India – were thoroughly revolutionized, and even China is nowon the way to a revolution.We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions ofChinese workers of their livelihood within a year’s time.In this way, big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, hasmerged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhereand has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in allother countries.It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set offrevolution in all other countries – revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish theliberation of their respective working class.Second, wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth andpower to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that whereverthis happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hithertoruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy.The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing theentailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale,and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of theguildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition –that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, theonly obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital.The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members ofsociety are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisivepower, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. 46 Draft of a Communist Confession of FaithFree competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the onlycondition of society in which big industry can make its way.Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois alsodestroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society,it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction ofthe representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition offree competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In theseconstitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters – that is to say, onlymembers of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeoisdeputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government.Third, everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as thebourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can beemployed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows thatthe growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital.Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into thegreat cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great massesin one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength.Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented,the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink totheir minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. Thegrowing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletariansocial revolution.– 12 –What were the further consequences of the industrialrevolution?Big industry created in the steam engine, and other machines, the means of endlessly expandingindustrial production, speeding it up, and cutting its costs. With production thus facilitated, thefree competition, which is necessarily bound up with big industry, assumed the most extremeforms; a multitude of capitalists invaded industry, and, in a short while, more was produced thanwas needed.As a consequence, finished commodities could not be sold, and a so-called commercial crisisbroke out. Factories had to be closed, their owners went bankrupt, and the workers were withoutbread. Deepest misery reigned everywhere.After a time, the superfluous products were sold, the factories began to operate again, wages rose,and gradually business got better than ever.But it was not long before too many commodities were again produced and a new crisis brokeout, only to follow the same course as its predecessor.Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuatedbetween periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisishas intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied bygeneral revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things.– 13 –What follows from these periodic commercial crises?First:That, though big industry in its earliest stage created free competition, it has nowoutgrown free competition; 47 Draft of a Communist Confession of Faiththat, for big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization ofproduction have become a fetter which it must and will shatter;that, so long as big industry remains on its present footing, it can be maintainedonly at the cost of general chaos every seven years, each time threatening thewhole of civilization and not only plunging the proletarians into misery but alsoruining large sections of the bourgeoisie;hence, either that big industry must itself be given up, which is an absoluteimpossibility, or that it makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organizationof society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competingindividual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to adefinite plan and taking account of the needs of all.Second: That big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible,bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that everymember of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties incomplete freedom.It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, producemisery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery andthese catastrophic depressions.We see with the greatest clarity:(i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social orderwhich no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and(ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evilsaltogether.– 14 –What will this new social order have to be like?Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of thehands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all thesebranches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account,according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.Moreover, since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property,and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industryby private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separatedfrom competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, beabolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production andthe distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called thecommunal ownership of goods.In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way tocharacterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by thedevelopment of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their maindemand. 48 Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith– 15 –Was not the abolition of private property possible at anearlier time?No. Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessaryconsequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old propertyrelations.Private property has not always existed.When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which couldnot be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture,which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property.And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property wasthe only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order.So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left overfor expanding the social capital and extending the forces of production – so long as this is notpossible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society’s productive forces, anda poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development.The agrarian Middle Ages give us the baron and the serf; the cities of the later Middle Ages showus the guildmaster and the journeyman and the day laborer; the 17th century has itsmanufacturing workers; the 19th has big factory owners and proletarians.It is clear that, up to now, the forces of production have never been developed to the point whereenough could be developed for all, and that private property has become a fetter and a barrier inrelation to the further development of the forces of production.Now, however, the development of big industry has ushered in a new period. Capital and theforces of production have been expanded to an unprecedented extent, and the means are at handto multiply them without limit in the near future. Moreover, the forces of production have beenconcentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois, while the great mass of the people are more andmore falling into the proletariat, their situation becoming more wretched and intolerable inproportion to the increase of wealth of the bourgeoisie. And finally, these mighty and easilyextended forces of production have so far outgrown private property and the bourgeoisie, thatthey threaten at any moment to unleash the most violent disturbances of the social order. Now,under these conditions, the abolition of private property has become not only possible butabsolutely necessary.– 16 –Will the peaceful abolition of private property be possible?It would be desirable if this could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last tooppose it. Communists know only too well that all conspiracies are not only useless, but evenharmful. They know all too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, butthat, everywhere and always, they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which werewholly independent of the will and direction of individual parties and entire classes.But they also see that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has beenviolently suppressed, and that in this way the opponents of communism have been workingtoward a revolution with all their strength. If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven torevolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we nowdefend them with words. 49 Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith– 17 –Will it be possible for private property to be abolished atone stroke?No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extentnecessary for the creation of a communal society.In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will beable to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficientquantity.– 18 –What will be the course of this revolution?Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirectdominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority ofthe people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only ofproletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling intothe proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat,and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost asecond struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as ameans for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihoodof the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, arethe following:(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritancetaxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.)forced loans, etc.(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates andshipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly throughcompensation in the form of bonds.(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against themajority of the people.(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land,in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolishedand with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay thesame high wages as those paid by the state.(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time asprivate property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies,especially for agriculture.(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a nationalbank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships;bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already undercultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at thedisposal of the nation.(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’scare, in national establishments at national cost. Education and productiontogether. 50 Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings forassociated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture andcombining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions whileavoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bringothers in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, theproletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of thestate all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed tothis end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizingeffects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’sproductive forces.Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands ofthe nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, andproduction will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever ofits old economic habits may remain.– 19 –Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in onecountry alone?No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth,and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none isindependent of what happens to the others.Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extentthat, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the strugglebetween them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will notmerely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries –that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany.It will develop in each of the these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or theother has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces.Hence, it will go slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with thefewest difficulties in England. It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world,and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, whilegreatly stepping up its pace.It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.– 20 –What will be the consequences of theultimate disappearance of private property?Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange anddistribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them inaccordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society.In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with theconduct of big industry will be abolished.There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society isoverproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of 51 Draft of a Communist Confession of Faithbeing expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond theelementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create newneeds and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and thestimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, asprogress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property,will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison asmanufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development ofindustry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs ofeveryone.The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property andis held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existingimprovements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forwardwhich will assure to society all the products it needs.In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members.The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary.Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order. The existence ofclasses originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up tothe present, will completely disappear. For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough tobring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities ofthe men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development.Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way oflife and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way,communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, willboth require an entirely different kind of human material.People will no longer be, as they are today, subordinated to a single branch of production, boundto it, exploited by it; they will no longer develop one of their faculties at the expense of all others;they will no longer know only one branch, or one branch of a single branch, of production as awhole. Even industry as it is today is finding such people less and less useful.Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes wellrounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system ofproduction in its entirety.The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factoryworker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and willcompletely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves withthe whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in responseto the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sidedcharacter which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communistsociety will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developedfaculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows thatsociety organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the onehand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing classdifferences on the other.A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear. Themanagement of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classesof people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association.The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrialpopulation into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of bothagriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development. 52 Draft of a Communist Confession of FaithThe general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of theforces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs ofall, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needsof others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of thecapacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor,through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation byall in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country – these are themain consequences of the abolition of private property.– 21 –What will be the influence of communist society on thefamily?It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns onlythe persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since itdoes away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this wayremoves the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of thewomen on the man, and of the children on the parents.And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the “community ofwomen”. Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society andwhich today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on privateproperty and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women,in fact abolishes it.– 22 –What will be the attitude of communism to existingnationalities?The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle ofcommunity will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and therebyto dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through theabolition of their basis, private property.8– 23 –What will be its attitude to existing religions?All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individualpeoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development whichmakes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance.9– 24 –How do communists differ from socialists?The so-called socialists are divided into three categories.[ Reactionary Socialists: ]The first category consists of adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already beendestroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation,bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal andpatriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, alltheir proposals are directed to this end. 53 Draft of a Communist Confession of FaithThis category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tearsfor the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists for thefollowing reasons:(i) It strives for something which is entirely impossible.(ii) It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the smallproducers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, andpriests – a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day societybut which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressedworkers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution.(iii) As soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and communist, thesereactionary socialists show their true colors by immediately making commoncause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians.[ Bourgeois Socialists: ]The second category consists of adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for itsfuture by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise. What they want, therefore, is to maintain thissociety while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it.To this end, some propose mere welfare measures – while others come forward with grandiosesystems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended topreserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society.Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work forthe enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow.[Democratic Socialists: ]Finally, the third category consists of democratic socialists who favor some of the same measuresthe communists advocate, as described in Question 18, not as part of the transition tocommunism, however, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the miseryand evils of present-day society.These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about theconditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, aclass which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it givesrise, has many interests in common with the proletariat.It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding withthese democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them– provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attackthe communists.It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences.– 25 –What is the attitude of the communists to theother political parties of our time?This attitude is different in the different countries.In England, France, and Belgium, where the bourgeoisie rules, the communists still have acommon interest with the various democratic parties, an interest which is all the greater the moreclosely the socialistic measures they champion approach the aims of the communists – that is, themore clearly and definitely they represent the interests of the proletariat and the more they dependon the proletariat for support. In England, for example, the working-class Chartists10 are infinitelycloser to the communists than the democratic petty bourgeoisie or the so-called Radicals. 54 Draft of a Communist Confession of FaithIn America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists mustmake the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisieand use it in the interests of the proletariat – that is, with the agrarian National Reformers.11In Switzerland, the Radicals, though a very mixed party, are the only group with which thecommunists can co-operate, and, among these Radicals, the Vaudois and Genevese are the mostadvanced.In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between thebourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisivestruggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows thatit is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in orderthe sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists mustcontinually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of thebourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisiewould allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derivefrom a bourgeois victory would consist(i) in various concessions which would facilitate the unification of the proletariatinto a closely knit, battle-worthy, and organized class; and(ii) in the certainly that, on the very day the absolute monarchies fall, the strugglebetween bourgeoisie and proletariat will start. From that day on, the policy of thecommunists will be the same as it now is in the countries where the bourgeoisie isalready in power. Demands of the Communist Party in Germany“Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” were written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels inParis between March 21 (when Engels arrived in Paris from Brussels) and March 24, 1848. Thisdocument was discussed by members of the Central Authority, who approved and signed it as the.political programme of the Communist League in the revolution that broke out in Germany. In Marchit was printed as a leaflet, for distribution among revolutionary German emigrant workers who wereabout to return home. Austrian and German diplomats in Paris informed their respective governmentsabout this as early as March 27, 28 and 29. (The Austrian Ambassador enclosed in his letter a copy ofthe leaflet which he dated “March 25”.) The leaflet soon reached members of the Communist Leaguein other countries, in particular, German emigrant workers in London.Early in April, the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” were published in such Germandemocratic papers as Berliner Zeitungs-Halle (special supplement to No. 82, April 5, 1848),Düsseldorfer Zeitung (No. 96, April 5, 1848), Mannheimer Abendzeitung (No. 96, April 6, 1848),Trier’sche Zeitung (No. 97, April 6, 1848, supplement), Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (No. 100, April9, 1848, supplement), and Zeitung für das deutsche Volk (No. 2 1, April 9, 1848).Marx and Engels, who left for Germany round about April 6 and some time later settled in Cologne,did their best along with their followers to popularise this programme document during the revolution.In 1848 and 1849 it was repeatedly published in the periodical press and in leaflet form. Not later thanSeptember 10, 1848, the “Demands” were printed in Cologne as a leaflet for circulation by theCologne Workers’ Association both in the town itself and in a number of districts of Rhenish Prussia.In addition to minor stylistic changes, point 10 in the text of the leaflet was worded differently fromthat published in March-April 1848. At the Second Democratic Congress held in Berlin in October1848, Friedrich Beust, delegate from the Cologne Workers’ Association, spoke, on behalf of the socialquestion commission, in favour of adopting a programme of action closely following the “Demands”.In November and December 1848, various points of the “Demands” were discussed at meetings of theCologne Workers’ Association. Many editions of the “Demands” published during the revolution andafter its defeat have survived to this day in their original form, some of them as copies kept in thepolice archives.At the end of 1848 or the beginning of 1849 an abridged version of the “Demands” was published inpamphlet form by Weller Publishers in Leipzig. The slogan at the beginning of the document, thesecond paragraph of point 9 and the last sentence of point 10 were omitted, and the words “TheCommittee” were not included among the signatories. In 1853, an abridged version of the “Demands”was printed, together with other documents of the Communist League, in the first part of the book DieCommunisten-Verschworungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts published in Berlin for purposes ofinformation by Wermuth and Stieber, two police officials, who staged a trial against the Communistsin Cologne in 1852. Later Engels reproduced the main points of the “Demands” in his essay On theHistory of the Communist League, published in November 1885 in the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, andas an introduction to the pamphlet: K. Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten Prozess zu Köln,Hottingen-Zürich, 1885.English translations of the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” appeared in thecollections: The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with an introduction andexplanatory notes by D. Ryazanoff, Martin Lawrence, London (1930); K. Marx, Selected Works, Vol.II, ed. V. Adoratsky, Moscow-Leningrad, Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in theUSSR (1936); ibid., New York (1 936); Birth of the Communist Manifesto, edited and annotated, withan Introduction by D. J. Struik, International Publishers, New York, 197 1, and in other publications.The text is from From MECW Volume 7, p. 3. 56 Demands of the Communist Party in GermanyDemands of the Communist Party in Germany“Workers of all countries, unite!”1. The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic.2. Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and to be elected,provided he has not been convicted of a criminal offence.3. Representatives of the people shall receive payment so that workers, too, shall be able tobecome members of the German parliament.4. Universal arming of the people. In future the armies shall be simultaneously labour armies, sothat the troops shall not, as formerly, merely consume, but shall produce more than is necessaryfor their upkeep.This will moreover be conducive to the organisation of labour.5. Legal services shall be free of charge.6. All feudal obligations, dues, corvées, tithes etc., which have hitherto weighed upon the ruralpopulation, shall be abolished without compensation.7. Princely and other feudal estates, together with mines, pits, and so forth, shall become theproperty of the state. The estates shall be cultivated on a large scale and with the most up-to-datescientific devices in the interests of the whole of society.8. Mortgages on peasant lands shall be declared the property of the state. Interest on suchmortgages shall be paid by the peasants to the state.9. In localities where the tenant system is developed, the land rent or the quit-rent shall be paid tothe state as a tax.The measures specified in Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 9 are to be adopted in order to reduce the communaland other burdens hitherto imposed upon the peasants and small tenant farmers without curtailingthe means available for defraying state expenses and without imperilling production.The landowner in the strict sense, who is neither a peasant nor a tenant farmer, has no share inproduction. Consumption on his part is, therefore, nothing but abuse.10. A state bank, whose paper issues are legal tender, shall replace all private banks.This measure will make it possible to regulate the credit system in the interest of the people as awhole, and will thus undermine the dominion of the big financial magnates. Further, by graduallysubstituting paper money for gold and silver coin, the universal means of exchange (thatindispensable prerequisite of bourgeois trade and commerce) will be cheapened, and gold andsilver will be set free for use in foreign trade. Finally, this measure is necessary in order to bindthe interests of the conservative bourgeoisie to the Government.11. All the means of transport, railways, canals, steamships, roads, the posts etc. shall be takenover by the state. They shall become the property of the state and shall be placed free at thedisposal of the impecunious classes.12. All civil servants shall receive the same salary, the only exception being that civil servantswho have a family to support and who therefore have greater requirements, shall receive a highersalary.13. Complete separation of Church and State. The clergy of every denomination shall be paidonly by the voluntary contributions of their congregations.14. The right of inheritance to be curtailed. 57 Demands of the Communist Party in Germany15. The introduction of steeply graduated taxes, and the abolition of taxes on articles ofconsumption.16. Inauguration of national workshops. The state guarantees a livelihood to all workers andprovides for those who are incapacitated for work.17. Universal and free education of the people.It is to the interest of the German proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie and the small peasants tosupport these demands with all possible energy. Only by the realisation of these demands will themillions in Germany, who have hitherto been exploited by a handful of persons and whom theexploiters would like to keep in further subjection, win the rights and attain to that power towhich they are entitled as the producers of all wealth.The CommitteeKarl Marx, Karl Schapper, H. Bauer, F. Engels, J. Moll, W. Wolff The Paris Commune.Address to the International Workingmen’s Association, May 1871The “Paris Commune” was composed by Karl Marx as an address to the General Council of theInternational, and included in a book, “The Civil War in France,” with the aim of distributing toworkers of all countries a clear understanding of the character and world-wide significance of theheroic struggle of the Communards and their historical experience to learn from. The book was widelycirculated by 1872 it was translated into several languages and published throughout Europe and theUnited States.The first address was delivered on July 23rd, 1870, five days after the beginning of the FrancoPrussian War. The second address, delivered on September 9, 1870, gave a historical overview of theevents a week after the army of Bonaparte was defeated. The third address, delivered on May 30,1871, two days after the defeat of the Paris Commune – detailed the significance and the underliningcauses of the first workers government ever created.The Civil War in France was originally published by Marx as only the third address, only the firsthalf of which is reproduced here. In 1891, on the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engelsput together a new collection of the work. Engels decided to include the first two addresses thatMarx made to the International.The Address is included here because it can be regarded as an amendment to the Manifesto,clarifying a number of issues relating to the state based on the experience of the Commune.On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of “Vive la Commune!” What is theCommune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?“The proletarians of Paris,” said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, “amidst thefailures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them tosave the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They haveunderstood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters oftheir own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.”But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wieldit for its own purposes.The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy,clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division oflabor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent bourgeois society as amighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by allmanner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies,and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th centuryswept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its lasthindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itselfthe offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.During the subsequent regimes, the government, placed under parliamentary control – that is,under the direct control of the propertied classes – became not only a hotbed of huge nationaldebts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it becamenot only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes;but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At thesame pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the classantagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character ofthe national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of anengine of class despotism. 59 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressivecharacter of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief. The Revolution of 1830,resulting in the transfer of government from the landlords to the capitalists, transferred it from themore remote to the more direct antagonists of the working men. The bourgeois republicans, who,in the name of the February Revolution, took the state power, used it for the June [Category1848]massacres, in order to convince the working class that “social” republic means the republicentrusting their social subjection, and in order to convince the royalist bulk of the bourgeois andlandlord class that they might safely leave the cares and emoluments of government to thebourgeois “republicans.”However, after their one heroic exploit of June, the bourgeois republicans had, from the front, tofall back to the rear of the “Party of Order” – a combination formed by all the rival fractions andfactions of the appropriating classes. The proper form of their joint-stock government was theparliamentary republic, with Louis Bonaparte for its president. Theirs was a regime of avowedclass terrorism and deliberate insult towards the “vile multitude.”If the parliamentary republic, as M. Thiers said, “divided them [the different fractions of theruling class] least,” it opened an abyss between that class and the whole body of society outsidetheir spare ranks. The restraints by which their own divisions had under former regimes stillchecked the state power, were removed by their union; and in view of the threatening upheaval ofthe proletariat, they now used that state power mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national warengine of capital against labor.In their uninterrupted crusade against the producing masses, they were, however, bound not onlyto invest the executive with continually increased powers of repression, but at the same time todivest their own parliamentary stronghold – the National Assembly – one by one, of all its ownmeans of defence against the Executive. The Executive, in the person of Louis Bonaparte, turnedthem out. The natural offspring of the “Party of Order” republic was the Second Empire.The empire, with the coup d’état for its birth certificate, universal suffrage for its sanction, andthe sword for its sceptre, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers notdirectly involved in the struggle of capital and labor. It professed to save the working class bybreaking down parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of government to thepropertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economicsupremacy over the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving for allthe chimera of national glory.In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had alreadylost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation. It was acclaimedthroughout the world as the savior of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed frompolitical cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerceexpanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the miseryof the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury.The state power, apparently soaring high above society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions.Its own rottenness, and the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare by the bayonet ofPrussia, herself eagerly bent upon transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris toBerlin. Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the statepower which nascent bourgeois society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its ownemancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformedinto a means for the enslavement of labor by capital.The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of “social republic,” with whichthe February [1848] Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vagueaspiration after a republic that was not only to supercede the monarchical form of class rule, butclass rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic. 60 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time, the social strongholdof the French working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers and the Rurals torestore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the empire. Pariscould resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced itby a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to betransformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppressionof the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in thevarious wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its memberswere naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. TheCommune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the sametime.Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once strippedof its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of theCommune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members ofthe Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vestedinterests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along withthe high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools ofthe Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hithertoexercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune.Having once got rid of the standing army and the police – the physical force elements of the oldgovernment – the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the “parsonpower,” by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. Thepriests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful inimitation of their predecessors, the apostles.The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the sametime cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessibleto all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force hadimposed upon it.The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served tomask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken,and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges wereto be elective, responsible, and revocable.The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres ofFrance. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the oldcentralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government ofthe producers.In a rough sketch of national organisation, which the Commune had no time to develop, it statesclearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, andthat in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with anextremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer theircommon affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblieswere again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any timerevocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The fewbut important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to besuppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal andthereafter responsible agents.The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by CommunalConstitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be 61 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it wasbut a parasitic excrescence.While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, itslegitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over societyitself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or sixyears which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universalsuffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves everyother employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-knownthat companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the rightman in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the otherhand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universalsuffrage by hierarchical investiture.12It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpartsof older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus,this new Commune, which breaks with the modern state power, has been mistaken for areproduction of the medieval Communes, which first preceded, and afterward became thesubstratum of, that very state power. The Communal Constitution has been mistaken for anattempt to break up into the federation of small states, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and theGirondins13, that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, hasnow become a powerful coefficient of social production. The antagonism of the Communeagainst the state power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle againstover-centralization. Peculiar historical circumstances may have prevented the classicaldevelopment, as in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may have allowed, as inEngland, to complete the great central state organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors, andferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary magistrates in the counties.The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hithertoabsorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By thisone act, it would have initiated the regeneration of France.The provincial French bourgeois saw in the Commune an attempt to restore the sway their orderhad held over the country under Louis Philippe, and which, under Louis Napoleon, wassupplanted by the pretended rule of the country over the towns. In reality, the CommunalConstitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of theirdistricts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests. Thevery existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but nolonger as a check upon the now superseded state power. It could only enter into the head of aBismarck – who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume hisold trade, so befitting his mental calibre, of contributor to Kladderadatsch (the Berlin Punch14) –it could only enter into such a head to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after thecaricature of the old French municipal organization of 1791, the Prussian municipal constitutionwhich degrades the town governments to mere secondary wheels in the police machinery of thePrussian state. The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions – cheap government– a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure:Fiscal Conservativesthe standing army and statefunctionarism. Its very existence presupposed the non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe atleast, is the normal encumbrance and indispensable cloak of class rule. It supplied the republicwith the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the “truerepublic” was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants.The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicityof interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive politicalform, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secretwas this: It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the 62 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which towork out the economical emancipation of labor.Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and adelusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his socialslavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundationupon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor emancipated,every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years,about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into theirown hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces ofpresent society with its two poles of capital and wage-slavery (the landlord now is but thesleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgininnocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with itsprostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, thebasis of all civilization!Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor ofthe many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted tomake individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, nowchiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associatedlabor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! Why, those member of the rulingclasses who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system– and they are many – have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operativeproduction. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede thecapitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production uponcommon plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchyand periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen,would it be but communism, “possible” communism?The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopiasto introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation,and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its owneconomical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historicprocesses, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free theelements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In thefull consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the workingclass can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with pen andinkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth theirignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plainworking men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their “naturalsuperiors,” and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed it at salaries the highestof which barely amounted to one-fifth what, according to high scientific authority*, is theminimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school-board – the old world writhedin convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labor, floatingover the Hôtel de Ville.And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as theonly class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris bourgeois –shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants – the wealthy capitalist alone excepted. The Commune had * Professor Huxley. [Note to the German addition of 1871.]63 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever recurring cause of dispute among the bourgeoisthemselves – the debtor and creditor accounts.15 The same portion of the bourgeois, after they hadassisted in putting down the working men’s insurrection of June 1848, had been at onceunceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors16 by the then Constituent Assembly. But this wasnot their only motive for now rallying around the working class. They felt there was but onealternative – the Commune, or the empire – under whatever name it might reappear. The empirehad ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financialswindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital,and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it hadshocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over theeducation of their children to the fréres Ignorantins,17 it had revolted their national feeling asFrenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruinsit made – the disappearance of the empire. In fact, after the exodus from Paris of the highBonapartist and capitalist boheme, the true bourgeois Party of Order came out in the shape of the“Union Republicaine,”18 enrolling themselves under the colors of the Commune and defending itagainst the wilful misconstructions of Thiers. Whether the gratitude of this great body of thebourgeois will stand the present severe trial, time must show.The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that “its victory was their only hope.” Ofall the lies hatched at Versailles and re-echoed by the glorious European penny-a-liner, one of themost tremendous was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. Think only of the love ofthe French peasant for the men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard indemnity.19 In theeyes of the French peasant, the very existence of a great landed proprietor is in itself anencroachment on his conquests of 1789. The bourgeois, in 1848, had burdened his plot of landwith the additional tax of 45 cents, in the franc; but then he did so in the name of the revolution;while now he had fomented a civil war against revolution, to shift on to the peasant’s shouldersthe chief load of the 5 milliards of indemnity to be paid to the Prussian. The Commune, on theother hand, in one of its first proclamations, declared that the true originators of the war would bemade to pay its cost. The Commune would have delivered the peasant of the blood tax – wouldhave given him a cheap government – transformed his present blood-suckers, the notary,advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, andresponsible to, himself. It would have freed him of the tyranny of the garde champetre, thegendarme, and the prefect; would have put enlightenment by the schoolmaster in the place ofstultification by the priest. And the French peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He wouldfind it extremely reasonable that the pay of the priest, instead of being extorted by the taxgatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the parishioners’ religious instinct.Such were the great immediate boons which the rule of the Commune – and that rule alone – heldout to the French peasantry. It is, therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate upon the morecomplicated but vital problems which the Commune alone was able, and at the same timecompelled, to solve in favor of the peasant – viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubusupon his parcel of soil, the prolétariat foncier (the rural proletariat), daily growing upon it, andhis expropriation from it enforced, at a more and more rapid rate, by the very development ofmodern agriculture and the competition of capitalist farming.The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte president of the republic; but the Party of Ordercreated the empire. What the French peasant really wants he commenced to show in 1849 and1850, by opposing his maire to the government’s prefect, his school-master to the government’spriest, and himself to the government’s gendarme. All the laws made by the Party of Order inJanuary and February 1850 were avowed measures of repression against the peasant. The peasantwas a Bonapartist, because the Great Revolution, with all its benefits to him, was, in his eyes,personified in Napoleon. This delusion, rapidly breaking down under the Second Empire (and in 64 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871its very nature hostile to the Rurals), this prejudice of the past, how could it have withstood theappeal of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the peasantry?The Rurals – this was, in fact, their chief apprehension – knew that three months’ freecommunication of Communal Paris with the provinces would bring about a general rising of thepeasants, and hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop thespread of the rinderpest [cattle pest – contagious disease].If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society,and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’sgovernment, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international.Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, theCommune annexed to France the working people all over the world.The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism, the rakes of all countriesrushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at thismoment, the right hand of Thiers is Ganessco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand isMarkovsky, the Russian spy. The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for animmortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by theirconspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotismby organizing police hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German workingman [Leo Frankel] its Minister of Labor. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, hadcontinually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to,and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honoured the heroic sons of Poland [J.Dabrowski and W. Wróblewski] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris. And, tobroadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of theconquering Prussians on one side, and the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals, on theother, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendôme Column.20The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measurescould but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people. Such were theabolition of the nightwork of journeymen bakers; the prohibition, under penalty, of theemployers’ practice to reduce wages by levying upon their workpeople fines under manifoldpretexts – a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator,judge, and executor, and filches the money to boot. Another measure of this class was thesurrender to associations of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshopsand factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or preferred to strikework.The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable for their sagacity and moderation, couldonly be such as were compatible with the state of a besieged town. Considering the colossalrobberies committed upon the city of Paris by the great financial companies and contractors,under the protection of Haussman,21 the Commune would have had an incomparably better title toconfiscate their property than Louis Napoleon had against the Orleans family. The Hohenzollernand the English oligarchs, who both have derived a good deal of their estates from churchplunders, were, of course, greatly shocked at the Commune clearing but 8,000f out ofsecularization.While the Versailles government, as soon as it had recovered some spirit and strength, used themost violent means against the Commune; while it put down the free expression of opinion allover France, even to the forbidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns; while itsubjected Versailles and the rest of France to an espionage far surpassing that of the SecondEmpire; while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers printed at Paris, and sifted allcorrespondence from and to Paris; while in the National Assembly the most timid attempts to putin a word for Paris were howled down in a manner unknown even to the Chambre introuvable of 65 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 18711816; with the savage warfare of Versailles outside, and its attempts at corruption and conspiracyinside Paris – would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by affecting to keep allthe decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace? Had the governmentof the Commune been akin to that of M. Thiers, there would have been no more occasion tosuppress Party of Order papers at Paris that there was to suppress Communal papers at Versailles.It was irritating indeed to the Rurals that at the very same time they declared the return to thechurch to be the only means of salvation for France, the infidel Commune unearthed the peculiarmysteries of the Picpus nunnery22, and of the Church of St. Laurent. It was a satire upon M.Thiers that, while he showered grand crosses upon the Bonapartist generals in acknowledgmentof their mastery in losing battles, singing capitulations, and turning cigarettes at Wilhelmshöhe,23the Commune dismissed and arrested its generals whenever they were suspected of neglectingtheir duties. The expulsion from, and arrest by, the Commune of one of its members [Blanchet]who had slipped in under a false name, and had undergone at Lyons six days’ imprisonment forsimple bankruptcy, was it not a deliberate insult hurled at the forger, Jules Favre, then still theforeign minister of France, still selling France to Bismarck, and still dictating his orders to thatparagon government of Belgium? But indeed the Commune did not pretend to infallibility, theinvariable attribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published its doings and sayings, itinitiated the public into all its shortcomings.In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of different stamp; some ofthem survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement,but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force oftradition; others mere brawlers who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set ofstereotyped declarations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation ofrevolutionists of the first water. After March 18, some such men did also turn up, and in somecases contrived to play pre-eminent parts. As far as their power went, they hampered the realaction of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development ofevery previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off; but timewas not allowed to the Commune.Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No longer any trace ofthe tawdry Paris of the Second Empire! No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords,Irish absentees, 24 American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, andWallachian boyards. No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely anyrobberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe,and that without any police of any kind.“We,” said a member of the Commune, “hear no longer of assassination, theft, and personalassault; it seems indeed as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservativefriends.”The cocottes had refound the scent of their protectors – the absconding men of family, religion,and, above all, of property. In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface –heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking fighting, bleedingParis – almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the Cannibals at its gates – radiantin the enthusiasm of its historic initiative!Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old world at Versailles – that assembly of theghouls of all defunct regimes, Legitimists and Orleanists, eager to feed upon the carcass of thenation – with a tail of antediluvian republicans, sanctioning, by their presence in the Assembly,the slaveholders’ rebellion, relying for the maintenance of their parliamentary republic upon thevanity of the senile mountebank at its head, and caricaturing 1789 by holding their ghastly 66 Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871meetings in the Jeu de Paume.1 There it was, this Assembly, the representative of everything deadin France, propped up to the semblance of life by nothing but the swords of the generals of LouisBonaparte. Paris all truth, Versailles all lie; and that lie vented through the mouth of Thiers.Thiers tells a deputation of the mayors of the Seine-et-Oise – “You may rely upon my word,which I have never broken!”He tells the Assembly itself that “it was the most freely elected and most liberal Assembly Franceever possessed”; he tells his motley soldiery that it was “the admiration of the world, and thefinest army France ever possessed”; he tells the provinces that the bombardment of Paris by himwas a myth: “If some cannon-shots have been fired, it was not the deed of the army of Versailles,but of some insurgents trying to make believe that they are fighting, while they dare not showtheir faces.” He again tells the provinces that “the artillery of Versailles does not bombard Paris,but only cannonades it.” He tells the Archbishop of Paris that the pretended executions andreprisals (!) attributed to the Versailles troops were all moonshine. He tells Paris that he was onlyanxious “to free it from the hideous tyrants who oppress it,” and that, in fact, the Paris of theCommune was “but a handful of criminals.”The Paris of M. Thiers was not the real Paris of the “vile multitude,” but a phantom Paris, theParis of the francs-fileurs,25 the Paris of the Boulevards, male and female – the rich, the capitalist,the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary bohome, and itscocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, and Saint-Germain; considering the civil war but anagreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through telescopes, counting the rounds ofcannon, swearing by their own honour and that of their prostitutes, that the performance was farbetter got up than it used to be at the Porte St. Martin. The men who fell were really dead; thecries of the wounded were cries in good earnest; and, besides, the whole thing was so intenselyhistorical.This is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the emigration of Coblenz was the France of M. de Calonne.
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