## Preface

| 1872
German Edition
1882
Russian Edition
1883
German Edition

| 1888
English Edition
1890
German Edition | 1892 Polish Edition | 1893 Italian Edition |

### The 1872 German Edition

The Communist League, an international association
of workers, which could of course be only a secret one, under conditions
obtaining at the time, commissioned us, the undersigned, at the Congress
held in London in November 1847, to write for publication a detailed theoretical
and practical programme for the Party. Such was the origin of the following
Manifesto, the manuscript of which travelled to London to be printed a
few weeks before the February [French] Revolution [in 1848]. First published in German, it
has been republished in that language in at least twelve different editions
in Germany, England, and America. It was published in English for the first
time in 1850 in the Red Republican, London, translated by Miss Helen
Macfarlane, and in 1871 in at least three different translations in America.
The french version first appeared in Paris shortly before the June insurrection
of 1848, and recently in Le Socialiste of New York. A new translation
is in the course of preparation. A Polish version appeared in London shortly
after it was first published in Germany. A Russian translation was published
in Geneva in the sixties [A]. Into Danish, too, it was translated shortly
after its appearance.

However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five
years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole,
as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved.
The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto
itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions
for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is
laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That
passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view
of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying
improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the
practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then,
still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time
held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details
been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz.,
that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery,
and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil War in France: Address
of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association,
1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident
that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to
the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks
on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section
IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated,
because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress
of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political
parties there enumerated.

But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have
no longer any right to alter. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with
an introduction bridging the gap from 1847 to the present day; but this
reprint was too unexpected to leave us time for that.

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

June 24, 1872, London

### The 1882 Russian Edition

The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the
Communist Party, translated by Bakunin [A], was published early in the ’sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol [reference to the Free Russian Printing House]. Then the West could see in it (the
Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view
would be impossible today.

What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time
(December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position
of the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various
countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It
was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European
reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces
of Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw
materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial
products. Both were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the
existing European system.

How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North
American for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking
the very foundations of European landed property — large and small. At
the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial
resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial
monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now.
Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself.
Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis
of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of
giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous
concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the
industrial regions.

And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European
princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation
from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention.
The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a
prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina [B], and Russia forms the vanguard
of revolutionary action in Europe.

The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the
inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia
we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and
bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land
owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina,
though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of
land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or,
on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution
such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian
Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West,
so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership
of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

January 21, 1882, London

### The 1883 German Edition

The preface to the present edition I must, alas,
sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole working class of Europe
and America owes more than to any one else — rests at Highgate Cemetery
and over his grave the first grass is already growing. Since his
death [March 14, 1883], there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing
the Manifesto. But I consider it all the more necessary again to state
the following expressly:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto — that economic
production, and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily
arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual
history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of
the primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history
of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between
dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution;
that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited
and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from
the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at
the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression,
class struggles — this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to
Marx. (1)

I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary
that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.

Frederick Engels

June 28, 1883, London

### The 1888 English Edition

The Manifesto was published as the platform of
the Communist League, a working men’s association, first exclusively German,
later on international, and under the political conditions of the Continent
before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League,
held in November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete
theoretical and practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January
1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before
the French Revolution of February 24. A French translation was brought
out in Paris shortly before the insurrection of June 1848. The first English
translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney’s
Red Republican, London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had
also been published.

The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 — the first great
battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie — drove again into the background,
for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working
class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was, again, as it had been
before the Revolution of February, solely between different sections of
the propertied class; the working class was reduced to a fight for political
elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of the middle-class Radicals.
Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life,
they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the
Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members
were arrested and, after eighteen months’ imprisonment, they were tried
in October 1852. This celebrated “Cologne Communist Trial” lasted from
October 4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms
of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately
after the sentence, the League was formally dissolved by the remaining members.
As to the Manifesto, it seemed henceforth doomed to oblivion.

When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for another
attack on the ruling classes, the International Working Men’s Association
sprang up. But this association, formed with the express aim of welding
into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could
not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto. The International
was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English
trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy, and
Spain, and to the Lassalleans in Germany. (2)

Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties,
entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class,
which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The
very events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats
even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men’s minds
the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the
way for a more complete insight into the true conditions for working-class
emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking in
1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found them in 1864.
Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even
the conservative English trade unions, though most of them had long since
severed their connection with the International, were gradually advancing
towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their president [W. Bevan] could
say in their name: “Continental socialism has lost its terror for us.”
In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway
among the working men of all countries.

The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since 1850, the German
text had been reprinted several times in Switzerland, England, and America.
In 1872, it was translated into English in New York, where the translation
was published in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. From this English
version, a French one was made in Le Socialiste of New York. Since
then, at least two more English translations, more or less mutilated, have
been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in England.
The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin, was published at Herzen’s
Kolokol office in Geneva, about 1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera
Zasulich, also in Geneva, in 1882. A new Danish edition is to be found
in Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French
translation in Le Socialiste, Paris, 1886. From this latter, a Spanish
version was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints
are not to be counted; there have been twelve altogether at the least.
An Armenian translation, which was to be published in Constantinople some
months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because the publisher was
afraid of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator
declined to call it his own production. Of further translations into other
languages I have heard but had not seen. Thus the history of the Manifesto
reflects the history of the modern working-class movement; at present,
it is doubtless the most wide spread, the most international production
of all socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions
of working men from Siberia to California.

Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist
manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the
adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists
in France, [See Robert Owen and François Fourier] both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects,
and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social
quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any
danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases
men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the “educated"
classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced
of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed
the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a
crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched
the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to
produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany.
Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class
movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism
was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was
that “the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class
itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take.
Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.

The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to
state that the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus belongs
to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the prevailing
mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily
following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from
which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of
that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution
of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been
a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited,
ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles
forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached
where the exploited and oppressed class — the proletariat — cannot attain
its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class — the
bourgeoisie — without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating
society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction,
and class struggles.

This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history
what Darwin’s theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually
approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed
towards it is best shown by my Conditions of the Working Class in England.
But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it already
worked out and put it before me in terms almost as clear as those in which
I have stated it here.

From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the following:

“However much that state of things may have altered during
the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto
are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail
might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend,
as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical
conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special
stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section
II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today.
In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the
accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in
view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution,
and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the
first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has
in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the
Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made
state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil
War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working
Men’s Association 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further,
it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient
in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also
that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition
parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice
are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed,
and the progress of history has swept from off the Earth the greater portion
of the political parties there enumerated.

"But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have
no longer any right to alter."

The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater
portion of Marx’s Capital. We have revised it in common, and I have added a few notes explanatory of historical allusions.

Frederick Engels

January 30, 1888, London

### The 1890 German Edition

Since [the first German preface (1883)] was written,
a new German edition of the Manifesto has again become necessary, and much
has also happened to the Manifesto which should be recorded here.

A second Russian translation — by Vera Zasulich — appeared in Geneva
in 1882; the preface to that edition was written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately, the original German manuscript has gone astray; I must therefore retranslate
from the Russian which will in no way improve the text. It reads:

[ Reprint of the 1882 Russian Edition ]

At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: Manifest
Kommunistyczny.

Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the Socialdemokratisk
Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885. Unfortunately, it is not quite complete;
certain essential passages, which seem to have presented difficulties to
the translator, have been omitted, and, in addition, there are signs of
carelessness here and there, which are all the more unpleasantly conspicuous
since the translation indicates that had the translator taken a little
more pains, he would have done an excellent piece of work.

A new French version appeared in 1886, in Le Socialiste of Paris;
it is the best published to date.

From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in El
Socialista of Madrid, and then reissued in pamphlet form: Manifesto
del Partido Communista por Carlos Marx y F. Engels, Madrid, Administracion
de El Socialista, Hernan Cortes 8.

As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the manuscript
of an Armenian translation was offered to a publisher in Constantinople.
But the good man did not have the courage to publish something bearing
the name of Marx and suggested that the translator set down his own name
as author, which the latter however declined.

After one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate American
translations had been repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version
at last appeared in 1888. This was my friend Samuel Moore, and we went
through it together once more before it went to press. It is entitled:
Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Authorized English translation, edited and annotated by Frederick Engels,
1888, London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet Street, E.C. I have added some
of the notes of that edition to the present one.

The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with enthusiasm,
at the time of its appearance, by the not at all numerous vanguard of scientific
socialism (as is proved by the translations mentioned in the first place),
it was soon forced into the background by the reaction that began with
the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally excommunicated
“by law” in the conviction of the Cologne Communists in November 1852.
With the disappearance from the public scene of the workers’ movement that
had begun with the February Revolution, the Manifesto too passed into the
background.

When the European workers had again gathered sufficient strength for
a new onslaught upon the power of the ruling classes, the International
Working Men’s Association came into being. Its aim was to weld together
into one huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and
America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles laid
down in the Manifesto. It was bound to have a programme which would not
shut the door on the English trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian,
and Spanish Proudhonists, and the German Lassalleans. This programme —
the considerations underlying the Statutes of the International — was
drawn up by Marx with a master hand acknowledged even by the Bakunin and
the anarchists. For the ultimate final triumph of the ideas set forth in
the Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon the intellectual development of
the working class, as it necessarily has to ensue from united action and
discussion. The events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital,
the defeats even more than the successes, could not but demonstrate to
the fighters the inadequacy of their former universal panaceas, and make
their minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions
for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The working class of
1874, at the dissolution of the International, was altogether different
from that of 1864, at its foundation. Proudhonism in the Latin countries,
and the specific Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out; and even the
ten arch-conservative English trade unions were gradually approaching the
point where, in 1887, the chairman of their Swansea Congress could say
in their name: “Continental socialism has lost its terror for us.” Yet
by 1887 continental socialism was almost exclusively the theory heralded
in the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent, the history of the Manifesto
reflects the history of the modern working-class movement since 1848. At
present, it is doubtless the most widely circulated, the most international
product of all socialist literature, the common programme of many millions
of workers of all countries from Siberia to California.

Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a socialist
manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were considered socialists. On
the one hand were the adherents of the various utopian systems, notably
the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at
that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out. On the
other, the manifold types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social
abuses through their various universal panaceas and all kinds of patch-work,
without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, people
who stood outside the labor movement and who looked for support rather
to the “educated” classes. The section of the working class, however, which
demanded a radical reconstruction of society, convinced that mere political
revolutions were not enough, then called itself Communist. It was
still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude communism.
Yet, it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of utopian
communism — in France, the “Icarian” communists of Cabet, and in Germany
that of Weitling. Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism
a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite
respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And since we were
very decidedly of the opinion as early as then that “the emancipation of
the workers must be the task of the working class itself,” [from the General Rules of the International] we could have
no hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor has it
ever occurred to us to repudiate it.

“Working men of all countries, unite!” But few voices responded when
we proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the
first Paris Revolution in which the proletariat came out with the demands
of its own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of most of
the Western European countries joined hands in the International Working
Men’s Association of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived
only nine years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all
countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there
is no better witness than this day. Because today[C], as I write these lines,
the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces,
mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one
flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day
to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress
of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress
of 1889. And today’s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and
landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all
countries are united indeed.

If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!

Frederick Engels

May 1, 1890, London

### The 1892 Polish Edition

The fact that a new Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto has become necessary gives rise to various thoughts.

First of all, it is noteworthy that of late the Manifesto has become an index, as it were, of the development of large-scale industry on the European continent. In proportion as large-scale industry expands in a given country, the demand grows among the workers of that country for enlightenment regarding their position as the working class in relation to the possessing classes, the socialist movement spreads among them and the demand for the Manifesto increases. Thus, not only the state of the labour movement but also the degree of development of large-scale industry can be measured with fair accuracy in every country by the number of copies of the Manifesto circulated in the language of that country.

Accordingly, the new Polish edition indicates a decided progress of Polish industry. And there can be no doubt whatever that this progress since the previous edition published ten years ago has actually taken place. Russian Poland, Congress Poland, has become the big industrial region of the Russian Empire. Whereas Russian large-scale industry is scattered sporadically — a part round the Gulf of Finland, another in the centre (Moscow and Vladimir), a third along the coasts of the Black and Azov seas, and still others elsewhere — Polish industry has been packed into a relatively small area and enjoys both the advantages and disadvantages arising from such concentration. The competing Russian manufacturers acknowledged the advantages when they demanded protective tariffs against Poland, in spite of their ardent desire to transform the Poles into Russians. The disadvantages — for the Polish manufacturers and the Russian government — are manifest in the rapid spread of socialist ideas among the Polish workers and in the growing demand for the Manifesto.

But the rapid development of Polish industry, outstripping that of Russia, is in its turn a new proof of the inexhaustible vitality of the Polish people and a new guarantee of its impending national restoration. And the restoration of an independent and strong Poland is a matter which concerns not only the Poles but all of us. A sincere international collaboration of the European nations is possible only if each of these nations is fully autonomous in its own house. The Revolution of 1848, which under the banner of the proletariat, after all, merely let the proletarian fighters do the work of the bourgeoisie, also secured the independence of Italy, Germany and Hungary through its testamentary executors, Louis Bonaparte and Bismarck; but Poland, which since 1792 had done more for the Revolution than all these three together, was left to its own resources when it succumbed in 1863 to a tenfold greater Russian force. The nobility could neither maintain nor regain Polish independence; today, to the bourgeoisie, this independence is, to say the last, immaterial. Nevertheless, it is a necessity for the harmonious collaboration of the European nations. It can be gained only by the young Polish proletariat, and in its hands it is secure. For the workers of all the rest of Europe need the independence of Poland just as much as the Polish workers themselves.

F. Engels

London, February 10, 1892

### The 1893 Italian Edition

Publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party coincided, one may say, with March 18, 1848, the day of the revolution in Milan and Berlin, which were armed uprisings of the two nations situated in the centre, the one, of the continent of Europe, the other, of the Mediterranean; two nations until then enfeebled by division and internal strife, and thus fallen under foreign domination. While Italy was subject to the Emperor of Austria, Germany underwent the yoke, not less effective though more indirect, of the Tsar of all the Russias. The consequences of March 18, 1848, freed both Italy and Germany from this disgrace; if from 1848 to 1871 these two great nations were reconstituted and somehow again put on their own, it was as Karl Marx used to say, because the men who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were, nevertheless, its testamentary executors in spite of themselves.

Everywhere that revolution was the work of the working class; it was the latter that built the barricades and paid with its lifeblood. Only the Paris workers, in overthrowing the government, had the very definite intention of overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But conscious though they were of the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the mass of French workers had as yet reached the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In the final analysis, therefore, the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class. In the other countries, in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, the workers, from the very outset, did nothing but raise the bourgeoisie to power. But in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible without national independence Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the unity and autonomy of the nations that had lacked them up to then: Italy, Germany, Hungary. Poland will follow in turn.

Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved the way, prepared the ground for the latter. Through the impetus given to large-scaled industry in all countries, the bourgeois regime during the last forty-five years has everywhere created a numerous, concentrated and powerful proletariat. It has thus raised, to use the language of the Manifesto, its own grave-diggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of these nations toward common aims. Just imagine joint international action by the Italian, Hungarian, German, Polish and Russian workers under the political conditions preceding 1848!

The battles fought in 1848 were thus not fought in vain. Nor have the forty-five years separating us from that revolutionary epoch passed to no purpose. The fruits are ripening, and all I wish is that the publication of this Italian translation may augur as well for the victory of the Italian proletariat as the publication of the original did for the international revolution.

The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism in the past. The first capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal figured: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?

Frederick Engels

London, February 1, 1893

Chapter 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians

1.
“This proposition,” I wrote in the preface to the English translation, “which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology, we both of
us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far
I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by my Conditions
of the Working Class in England. But when I again met Marx at Brussels,
in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms
almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.” [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890]

2.
Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself
to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto.
But in his first public agitation, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond demanding
co-operative workshops supported by state credit.

A.
The first Russian translation of the Manifesto of the Communist Party was made by Bakunin, who despite being one of Marx and Engels’ most pronounced opponents in the working class movement, saw the great revolutionary importance contained within the Manifesto. Published in Geneva in 1869 (printing it in Russia was impossible due to state censorship), Bakunin’s translation was not completely accurate, and was replaced a decade later by Plekhanov’s translation in 1882, for which both Marx and Engels wrote a preface.

B.
A reference to the events that occurred in Russia after the assassination, on March, 1, 1881, of Emperor Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya members. Alexander III, his successor, was staying in Gatchina for fear of further terrorism.

C.
The issue of 30 December 1871 of Woodhulls & Claflin's weekly contained an exact copy of Helen Macfarlane's translation for the Red Republican but neither the Red Republican nor Helen Macfarlane were acknowledged.

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-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic
by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled
back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition
parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself
a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face
of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies,
and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto
of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London
and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French,
German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

## Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians(1)

[German Original]

The history of all hitherto existing society(2) 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 connexions 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.

Chapter 2: Proletarians and Communists

1.
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the
means of social production and employers of wage labour.

By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having
no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour
power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]

2.
That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society,
the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but
unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common
ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the
social foundation from which all 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 from India to Ireland. The inner organisation
of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form,
by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1881) crowning discovery of the true nature
of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the
primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate
and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution
in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,
second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]

3.
Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a
head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

4.
This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy
and France, after they had purchased or conquered 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 masters local self-government
and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the
economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the
typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

In 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 the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties
by this only:

1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different
countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of
the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.

2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of
the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always
and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced
and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that
section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically,
they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly
understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general
results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other
proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow
of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on
ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or
that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from
an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our
very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a
distinctive feature of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to
historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour
of bourgeois property.

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property
generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois
private property is the final and most complete expression of the system
of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms,
on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the
right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour,
which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom,
activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property
of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded
the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of
industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying
it daily.

Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a
bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits
wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a
new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present
form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine
both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social
status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the
united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united
action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into
the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby
transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the
property that is changed. It loses its class character.

Let us now take wage-labour.

The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum
of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer
in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates
by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence.
We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products
of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction
of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour
of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character
of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase
capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling
class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated
labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen,
to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in
Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society
capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is
dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois,
abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of
bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom
is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production,
free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears
also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave
words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any,
only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered
traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic
abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production,
and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property.
But in your existing society, private property is already done away with
for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely
due to its 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 whose existence 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 is just what we intend.

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital,
money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e.,
from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into
bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality
vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other
person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This
person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of
society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the
labour of others by means of such appropriations.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all
work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to
the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing,
and those who acquire anything do not work.
The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology:
that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating
material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic
mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the
bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of
production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical
with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority,
a mere training to act as a machine.

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition
of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom,
culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions
of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence
is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential
character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of
existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal
laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present
mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise
and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share
with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in
the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property,
you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois
form of property.

Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous
proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?
On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family
exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement
in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public
prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement
vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by
their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace
home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social
conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect,
of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented
the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the
character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence
of the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed
co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the
more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians
are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of
commerce and instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie
in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears
that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and,
naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common
to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away
with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation
of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be
openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have
no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take
the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common
and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached
with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically
concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is
self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must
bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e.,
of prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries
and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they
have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political
supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute
itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in
the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and
more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom
of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production
and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.
United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the
first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will
also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also
be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within
the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to
an end.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical
and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious
examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views,
and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change
in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and
in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character 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 the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but
express that 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 18th
century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with
the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and
freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition
within the domain of knowledge.

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and
juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development.
But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly
survived this change.”

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice,
etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes
eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of
constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to
all past historical experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all
past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms
that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past
ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder,
then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity
and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general
ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance
of class antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional
property relations; no wonder that its development 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 the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win
the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees,
all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production
in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling
class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means
of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of
bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically
insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip
themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and
are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in 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. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national
bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands
of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State;
the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the
soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability 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 labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial
production, &c, &c.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared,
and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association
of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one
class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with
the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise
itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling
class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production,
then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions
for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will
thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,
we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all.

Chapter 3: Socialist and Communist Literature

## Chapter III. Socialist and Communist Literature

### 1. Reactionary Socialism

### A. Feudal Socialism

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the
aristocracies of France and England
to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution
of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation[A], these aristocracies
again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political
struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained
possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration
period had become impossible.(1)

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose
sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment
against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class
alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on
their new masters 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, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter,
witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s
core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend
the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian
alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them,
saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with
loud and irreverent laughter.

One section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited
this spectacle.

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different
to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under
circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now
antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never
existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring
of their own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of
their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts
to this, that under the bourgeois régime a class is being developed which
is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates
a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in
all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life,
despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples
dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour,
for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.(2)

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so
has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.
Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage,
against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and
poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother
Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest
consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

### B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that
was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence
pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval
burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the
modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed,
industrially and commercially, 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 petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat
and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself 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 completely disappear 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 was natural that writers who sided with the
proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the
bourgeois régime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and
from the standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels
for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was
the head of this school, not only in France but also in England.

This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions
in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies
of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery
and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands;
overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty
bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production,
the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war
of extermination between nations, the dissolution 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 of production and of exchange, and with them
the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern
means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property
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” Socialism

The Socialist and Communist literature of France,
a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power,
and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced
into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun
its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits
(men of letters),
eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when
these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions
had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions,
this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and
assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the
Eighteenth Century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing
more than the demands of “Practical Reason” in general, and the utterance
of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their
eyes, 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 harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience,
or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting 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 on which the classical works of ancient heathendom
had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane
French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the
French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic
functions of money, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity”, and beneath the
French criticism of the bourgeois state 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 it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle
of one class with the other, he felt conscious 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 Human
Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who
exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.

This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and
solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion,
meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.

The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and 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 the political movement with the Socialist demands, of
hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative
government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press,
bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching
to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by
this bourgeois movement. German Socialism 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 economic conditions
of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very
things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors,
country squires, and officials, 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 same governments, just at that time, dosed the German
working-class risings.

While this “True” Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for
fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented
a reactionary interest, the interest of German Philistines. In Germany,
the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since
then constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real
social basis of the existing state of things.

To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in
Germany. The industrial and political 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 of sickly 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 amongst such
a public.

And on its part German Socialism recognised, more and more, its
own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model
nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every
villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic
interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the
extreme length of directly opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency
of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of
all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist
and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong
to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.(3)

### 2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing
social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois
society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers
of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of
societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics,
hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism
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 the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They
desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating
elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. 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 complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such
a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem,
it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the
bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas
concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism
sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working
class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the
material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of
any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence,
this form of Socialism, 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 the continued existence
of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations
between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify
the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when,
it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties:
for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of
the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously 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 Communism

We do not here refer to
that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given
voice 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 universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown,
necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat,
as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation,
conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending
bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these
first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character.
It inculcated universal asceticism and social 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 struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section
1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as
well as the action of the decomposing 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
political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development
of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer
to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws,
that are to create these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically
created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual,
spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat to an organisation of
society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves
itself, 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 the working class, as being the most suffering class.
Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the
proletariat exist for them.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings,
causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all
class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of
society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal 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 possible plan of the best possible state
of society?

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary
action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed
to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social
Gospel.

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the
proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic
conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings
of that class for a general reconstruction of society.

But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical
element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are
full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working
class. The practical measures proposed in them — such as the abolition
of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying
on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage
system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the function
of the state into a mere superintendence of production — all these proposals
point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that
time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised
in their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals,
therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.

The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism
and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion
as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic
standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all
practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although
the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary,
their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They
hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the
progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore,
endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile
the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of
their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres”, of establishing
“Home Colonies”, or setting up a “Little Icaria”(4)
— duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem — and to realise all these castles
in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of
the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary [or]
conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more
systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious 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 the Réformistes.

Chapter 4: Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties

(1)
Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830). [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]

(2)
This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock companies. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]

(3)
The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to dabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical type of this tendency is Mr Karl Gruen. [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890.]

(4) Phalanstéres were Socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his Utopia and, later on, to his American Communist colony. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]

“Home Colonies” were what Owen called his Communist model societies. Phalanstéres was the name of the public palaces planned by Fourier. Icaria was the name given to the Utopian land of fancy, whose Communist institutions Cabet portrayed. [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890.]

[A]
A reference to the movement for a reform of the electoral law which, under the pressure of the working class, was passed by the British House of Commons in 1831 and finally endorsed by the House of Lords in June, 1832. The reform was directed against monopoly rule of the landed and finance aristocracy and opened the way to Parliament for the representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. Neither workers nor the petty-bourgeois were allowed electoral rights, despite assurances they would.

Section 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 the momentary interests of the working
class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take
care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with
the Social-Democrats(1) against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical
position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from
the great Revolution.

In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the
fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic
Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.

In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution
as the prime condition for national 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 the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.

But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working
class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between
bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway
use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and 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 the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that
country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried
out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a
much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth,
and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution
in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian
revolution.

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question
in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development
at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic
parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly
declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow
of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a
Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.

Working Men of All Countries, Unite!

(1)
The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin,
in literature by Louis Blanc, in the daily press by the Réforme.
The name of Social-Democracy signifies, with these its inventors, a section
of the Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with socialism. [Engels, English Edition 1888]

* * *

The famous final phrase of the Manifesto, “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”, in the original German is: “Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!” Thus, a more correct translation would be “Proletarians of all countries, Unite!”

“Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!” is a popularisation of the last three sentences, and is not found in any official translation. Since this English translation was approved by Engels, we have kept the original intact.