In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a 
whole? 

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to 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 the 
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 condi- 
tions. | 

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 the 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 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 a 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, 1.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 bourgeoisie 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, 1.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 appropriation. 

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 modes of producing and appropri- 
ating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disap- 

pearance 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.4 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 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 will 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 Com- 
munists 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 parent and child, becomes all the more 
disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all 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 whole bourgeoisie in chorus. 

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of produc- 
tion. He hears that the instruments of production are to be ex- 
ploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclu- 
sion 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 produc- 
tion. 

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 communi- 
ty of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial. 

Our bourgeois, not content with having the 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, 7.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 antagonisms 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 is 
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 conceptions, 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 produc- 
tion is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the 
ideas of its ruling class. 

When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but 
express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new 
one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps 
even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence. 

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions 
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in 
the 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 
involves 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 instru- 
ments of production in the hands of the State, 1.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, there- 
fore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but 
which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, neces- 
sitate further inroads upon the old social order,‘ and are unavoid- 
able as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. 

These measures will of course be different in different coun- 
tries, °° 

Nevertheless in the 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 right 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 labour. Establishment of industrial 
armies, especially for agriculture. 

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; 
gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a 
more equable distribution of the population 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. 

III