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Manifesto of the Communist Party By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord
and serf, guild-master(3)
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open
fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution
of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find
almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a
manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians,
knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals,
guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes,
again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has
sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class
antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the
old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie,
possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class
antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great
hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang
the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first
elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of
the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian
and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America,
trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an
impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the
tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, in which
industrial production was monopolised by closed
guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The
manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one
side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour
between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the
demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam
and machinery revolutionised industrial production.
The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place
of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the
whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world
market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given
an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land.
This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and
in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the
same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed
into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern
bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a
series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. Each step in the development of the
bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that
class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and
self-governing association in the medieval commune(4):
here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable
“third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of
manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy
as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the
great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the
establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for
itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The
executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a
most revolutionary part. The
bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has
put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly
torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”,
and has left remaining
no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
“cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of
religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of
philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It
has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the
numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by
religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless,
direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo
every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to
with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest,
the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the
family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere
money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to
pass that the brutal display of vigour in the
Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement
in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s
activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian
pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted
expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and
crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,
and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of
society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising
of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from
all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed
ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last
compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind. The
need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie
over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its
exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production
and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists,
it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it
stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are
daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose
introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised
nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw
material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are
consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of
the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants,
requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In
place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have
intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as
in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations
of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and
narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous
national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement
of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of
communication, draws all, even the most barbarian,
nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy
artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces
the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It
compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of
production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation
into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it
creates a world after its own image. The 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 a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made
barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised
ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing
away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production,
and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised
the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The
necessary consequence of this was political centralisation.
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests,
laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one
nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest,
one frontier, and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce
one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces
than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces
to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture,
steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents
for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole
populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a
presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? We see then: the means of production and of
exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated
in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of
production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society
produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of
agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of
property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive
forces; 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 constitution adapted 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 its relations of production, of
exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means
of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to
control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the
history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions
of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the
existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the
commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the
entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these
crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but
also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically
destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier
epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism;
it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the
supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be
destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation,
too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the
development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they
have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered,
and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they
bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of
bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to
comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over
these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive
forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more
thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for
more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means
whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie
felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the
weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men
who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e.,
capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern
working class, developed — a class of labourers,
who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as
their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a
commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed
to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the
market. Owing to the extensive use of machinery,
and to the division of labour, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm
for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the
most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is
required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted,
almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for
maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a
commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal
to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of
the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of
machinery and division of labour increases, in the
same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of
the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by
increased speed of machinery, etc. Modern Industry has converted the little
workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial
capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the
factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates
of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect
hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the
bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved
by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all,
by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this
despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more
petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. The
less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour,
in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women.
Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for
the working class. All are instruments of labour,
more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he
receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the
bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc. The
lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants
— all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their
diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is
carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists,
partly because their specialised skill is rendered
worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited
from all classes of the population. The proletariat goes through various stages
of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At
first the contest is carried on by individual labourers,
then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in
one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them.
They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production,
but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported
wares that compete with their labour, they smash to
pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force
the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages. At this stage, the labourers
still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up
by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact
bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the
union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political
ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover
yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do
not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of
absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty
bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands
of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the
bourgeoisie. But with the development of industry, the
proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater
masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various
interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more
and more equalised, in proportion as machinery
obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial
crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The
increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes
their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual
workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of
collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form
combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in
order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order
to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there,
the contest breaks out into riots. Now and then the workers are victorious,
but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the
immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union
is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by
modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in
contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same
character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class
struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the
burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required
centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few
years. This organisation
of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party,
is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers
themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.
It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by
taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried. Altogether collisions between the classes
of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the
proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first
with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie
itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry;
at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. 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 the proletariat with its own elements of political and general
education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for
fighting the bourgeoisie. Further, as we have already seen, entire
sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, 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 going on within the
ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a
violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts
itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the
future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of
the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the
bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the
bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. Of
all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the
proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.
The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry;
the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small
manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight
against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions
of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative.
Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of
history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of
their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their
present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to
place themselves at that of the proletariat. The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat]
the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of
the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a
proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more
for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. In the condition of the proletariat, those
of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is
without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer
anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England
as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of
national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois
prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. All the preceding classes that got the
upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting
society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians
cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by
abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every
other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to
secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities
for, and insurances 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 society being sprung into the air. Though not in substance, yet in form, the
struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national
struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all
settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. In depicting the most general phases of the
development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war,
raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out
into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays
the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. Hitherto,
every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the
antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it
under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in
the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as
the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to
develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on
the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper
and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a
pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And
here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the
ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon
society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent
to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot
help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of
being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other
words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. The essential conditions
for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the
formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests
exclusively on competition between the labourers.
The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie,
replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to
competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The
development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very
foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What
the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its
fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. |