Excerpts
from the Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)
Marx
and Engels used a couple of terms here that need to be clarified. First of all,
bourgeoisie referred to the new business and industrial class that had emerged
in the last few centuries before his time (as opposed to the traditional landed
aristocracy); proletariat referred to the workers in these factories (owned by
the bourgeoisie), who, in Marx’ view, were “wage slaves,” bound to work for
wages lest they starve.
Part
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, guildmaster 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 distinctive
feature: It has simplified the 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. . . .
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..
The
bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history.
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 no other
bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.”
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, 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.
Part
II: Proletarians and Communists
What
else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes
its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas
of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When
people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact
that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and
that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of
the old conditions of existence.
When
the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome
by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to
rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death-battle with the then
revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of
conscience, merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the
domain of knowledge..
We
have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is
to raise the proletariat 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 the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands
of the state, i. e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to
increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
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 public purposes.
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.
Centralization
of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state
capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6.
Centralization
of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7.
Extension
of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing
into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in
accordance with a common plan.
8.
Equal
obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture.
9.
Combination
of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the
distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the
populace over the country.
10.
Free
education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory
labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production,
etc.
In
place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we
shall have an association in which the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all.
Part
IV: Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition
Parties
..
Workingmen of all countries, unite!
