Question 1: What is communism? 

Answer: Communism is the doctrine of the conditions for the 
emancipation of the proletariat. 

Question 2: What is the proletariat? 

Answer: The proletariat is that class of society which procures its 
means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labour' 
and not from the profit derived from any capital; whose weal and 
woe, whose life and death, whose whole existence depend on the 
demand for labour, hence, on the alternation of times of good and 
bad business, on the fluctuations resulting from unbridled competi- 
tion. The proletariat, or class of proletarians, is, in a word, the 
working class of the nineteenth century. 

Question 3: Then there have not always been proletarians? 

Answer: No. Poor folk and working classes have always existed,!>’ 
and the working classes have for the most part been poor. But such 
poor, such workers who live under the conditions just stated, that is, 
proletarians, have not always existed, any more than competition has 
always been free and unbridled. 

Question 4: How did the proletariat arise? 

Answer: The proletariat arose as a result of the industrial 
revolution which took place in England in the latter half of the last 
century and which has repeated itself since then in all the civilised 
countries of the world. This industrial revolution was brought about 
by the invention of the steam-engine, of various spinning machines, 
of the power-loom, and of a great number of other mechanical 
devices. These machines which were very expensive and, consequent- 
ly, could only be purchased by big capitalists, changed the entire 

hitherto existing mode of production and supplanted the former 
workers because machines produced cheaper and better commodi- 
ties thancould the workers with their imperfect spinning-wheels and 
hand-looms. Thus, these machines delivered industry entirely into 
the hands of the big capitalists and rendered the workers’ scanty 
property (tools, looms, etc.) quite worthless, so that the capitalists 
soon had their hands on everything and the workers were left with 
nothing. In this way the factory system was introduced into the ma- 
nufacture of clothing materials—Once the impetus had been given 
to the introduction of machinery and the factory system, this system 
was soon applied to all the other branches of industry, notably the 
calico and book-printing trades, pottery, and hardware industry. 
There was more and more division of labour among the individual 
workers, so that the worker who formerly had made a whole article 
now produced only a part of it. This division of labour made it 
possible to supply products more speedily and therefore more 
cheaply. It reduced the activity of each worker to a very simple, 
constantly repeated mechanical operation, which could be performed 
not only just as well but even much better by a machine. In this 
way, all these branches of industry came one after another under the 
domination of steam-power, machinery, and the factory system, just 
like spinning and weaving. But they thus fell at the same time 
completely into the hands of the big capitalists, and here too the 
workers were deprived of the last shred of independence. Gradually, 
in addition to actual manufacture, the handicrafts likewise fell 
increasingly under the domination of the factory system, for here 
also the big capitalists more and more supplanted the small 
craftsmen by the establishment of large workshops, in which many 
savings on costs can be made and there can be a very high division of 
labour. Thus we have now reached the point when in the civilised 
countries almost all branches of labour are carried on under the 
factory system, and in almost all branches handicraft and manufac- 
ture have been ousted by large-scale industry.—As a result, the 
former middle classes, especially the smaller master handicraftsmen, 
have been increasingly ruined, the former position of the workers 
has been completely changed, and two new classes which are 
gradually swallowing up all other classes have come into being, 
namely: 

I. The class of big capitalists who already now in all civilised 
countries almost exclusively own all the means of subsistence and the 
raw materials and instruments (machinery, factories, etc.), needed 
for the production of these means of subsistence. This class is the 
bourgeois class or the bourgeoisie. 

Principles of Communism 343 

II. The class of the completely propertyless, who are compelled 
therefore to sell their labour to the bourgeois in order to obtain the 
necessary means of subsistence in exchange. This class is called the 
class of the proletarians or the proletariat. 

Question 5: Under what conditions does this sale of the labour of 
the proletarians to the bourgeois take place? 

Answer: Labour is a commodity like any other and its price is 
determined by the same laws as that of any other commodity. The 
price of a commodity under the domination of large-scale industry 
or of free competition, which, as we shall see, comes to the same 
thing, is on the average always equal to the cost of production of that 
commodity. The price of labour is, therefore, likewise equal to the 
cost of production of labour. The cost of production of labour 
consists precisely of the amount of the means of subsistence required 
for the worker to maintain himself in a condition in which he is 
capable of working and to prevent the working class from dying out. 
Therefore, the worker will not receive for his labour any more than 
is necessary for that purpose; the price of labour, or wages, will be 
the lowest, the minimum required for subsistence. Since business is 
now worse, now better, the worker will receive now more, now less, 
just as the factory owner receives now more, now less for his 
commodity. But just as on the average between good times and bad 
the factory owner receives for his commodity neither more nor less 
than the cost of its production, so also the worker will on the average 
receive neither more nor less than this minimum. This economic law 
of wages will come to be more stringently applied the more all 
branches of labour are taken over by large-scale industry. 

Question 6: What working classes existed before the industrial 
revolution? 

Answer: Depending on the different stages of the development of 
society, the working classes lived in different conditions and stood in 
different relations to the possessing and ruling classes. In ancient 
times the working people were the slaves of their owners, just as they 
still are in many backward countries and even in the southern part of 
the United States. In the Middle Ages they were the serfs of the 
landowning nobility, just as they still are in Hungary, Poland, and 
Russia. In the Middle Ages and up to the industrial revolution there 
were in the towns also journeymen in the service of petty-bourgeois 
craftsmen, and with the development of manufacture there gradual- 
ly emerged manufactory workers, who were already employed 
by the bigger capitalists. 

Question 7: In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave? 

Answer: The slave is sold once and for all, the proletarian has to sell 

himself by the day and by the hour. Being the property of one 
master, the individual slave has, since it is in the interest of this 
master, a guaranteed subsistence, however wretched it may be; the 
individual proletarian, the property, so to speak, of the whole 
bourgeois class, whose labour is only bought from him when some- 
body needs it, has no guaranteed subsistence. This subsistence is 
guaranteed only to the proletarian class as a whole. The slave stands 
outside competition, the proletarian stands within it and feels all its 
fluctuations. The slave is accounted a thing, not a member of civil 
society; the proletarian is recognised as a person, as a member of civil 
society. Thus, the slave may have a better subsistence than the 
proletarian, but the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of 
development of society and himself stands at a higher stage than the 
slave. The slave frees himself by abolishing, among all the private 
property relationships, only the relationship of slavery and thereby 
only then himself becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free 
himself only by abolishing private property in general. 

Question 8: In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf? 

Answer: The serf has the possession and use of an instrument of 
production, a piece of land, in return for handing over a portion of 
the yield or for the performance of work. The proletarian works 
with instruments of production belonging to another person for the 
benefit of this other person in return for receiving a portion of the 
yield. The serf gives, to the proletarian is given. The serf has a 
guaranteed subsistence, the proletarian has not. The serf stands 
outside competition, the proletarian stands within it. The serf frees 
himself either by running away to the town and there becoming a 
handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money instead of labour 
and products and becoming a free tenant; or by driving out his 
feudal lord and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering 
in one way or another into the possessing class and competition. The 
proletarian frees himself by doing away with competition, private 
property and all class distinctions. 

Question 9: In what way does the proletarian differ from the 
handicraftsman ?* 

Question 10: In what way does the proletarian differ from the 
manufactory worker? 

Answer: The manufactory worker of the sixteenth to the 
eighteenth centuries almost everywhere still owned an instrument of 
production, his loom, the family spinning-wheels, and a little plot of 

* Half a page is left blank by Engels in the manuscript. The answer is in the “Draft 
of aCommunist Confession of Faith” (see this volume, p. 101).—Ed. 

Principles of Communism 345 

land which he cultivated in his leisure hours. The proletarian has 
none of these things. The manufactory worker lives almost always 
in the country and in more or less patriarchal relations with his 
landlord or his employer; the proletarian lives mostly in large towns, 
and stands to his employer in a purely money relationship. The 
manufactory worker is torn up from his patriarchal relations by 
large-scale industry, loses the property he still has and thereby only 
then himself becomes a proletarian. 

Question 11: What were the immediate results of the industrial 
revolution and the division of society into bourgeois and proletari- 
ans? 

Answer: Firstly, owing to the continual cheapening of the price of 
industrial products as a result of machine labour, the old system of 
manufacture or industry founded upon manual labour was com- 
pletely destroyed in all countries of the world. All semi-barbarian 
countries, which until now had been more or less outside historical 
development and whose industry had until now been based on 
manufacture, were thus forcibly torn out of their isolation. They 
bought the cheaper commodities of the English and let their own 
manufactory workers go to ruin. Thus countries that for thousands 
of years had made no progress, for example India, were revolution- 
ised through and through, and even China is now marching towards 
a revolution. It has reached the point that a new machine invented 
today in England, throws millions of workers in China out of work 
within a year. Large-scale industry has thus brought all the peoples 
of the earth into relationship with one another, thrown all the small 
local markets into the world market, prepared the way everywhere 
for civilisation and progress, and brought it about that everything 
that happens in the civilised countries must have its repercussions on 
all other countries. So if now in England or France the workers 
liberate themselves, this must lead to revolutions in all other 
countries, which sooner or later will also bring about the liberation of 
the workers in those countries. 

Secondly, wherever large-scale industry replaced manufacture, the 
industrial revolution developed the bourgeoisie, its wealth and its 
power, to the highest degree and made it the first class in the land. 
The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie 
obtained political power and ousted the hitherto ruling classes—the 
aristocracy, the guild-burghers and the absolute monarchy represent- 
ing both. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, 
the nobility, by abolishing entails or the ban on the sale of landed 
property, and all privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of 
the guild-burghers by abolishing all guilds and craft privileges. In 

place of both it put free competition, that is, a state of society in 
which everyone has the right to engage in any branch of industry he 
likes, and where nothing can hinder him in carrying it on except lack 
of the necessary capital. The introduction of free competition is 
therefore the public declaration that henceforward the members of 
society are only unequal in so far as their capital is unequal, that 
capital has become the decisive power and therefore the capitalists, 
the bourgeois, have become the first class in society. But free 
competition is necessary for the beginning of large-scale industry 
since it is the only state of society in which large-scale industry can 
grow. The bourgeoisie having thus annihilated the social power of 
the nobility and the guild-burghers, annihilated their political power 
as well. Having become the first class in society, the bourgeoisie 
proclaimed itself also the first class in the political sphere. It did 
this by establishing the representative system, which rests upon 
bourgeois equality before the law and the legal recognition of free 
competition, and which in European countries was introduced in the 
form of constitutional monarchy. Under these constitutional 
monarchies those only are electors who possess a certain amount of 
capital, that is to say, the bourgeois; these bourgeois electors elect 
the deputies, and these bourgeois deputies, by means of the right to 
refuse taxes, elect a bourgeois government. 

Thirdly, the industrial revolution built up the proletariat in the 
same measure in which it built up the bourgeoisie. In the same 
proportion in which the bourgeois became wealthier, the proletari- 
ans became more numerous. For since proletarians can only be 
employed by capital and since capital only increases when it employs 
labour, the growth of the proletariat keeps exact pace with the 
growth of capital. At the same time it concentrates the bourgeois as 
well as the proletarians in large cities, in which industry can most 
profitably be carried on, and through this throwing together of great 
masses in one place it makes the proletarians conscious of their 
power. Further, the more it develops, the more machines are 
invented which displace manual labour, the more large-scale 
industry, as we already said, depresses wages to their minimum, and 
thereby makes the condition of the proletariat more and more 
unbearable. Thus, through the growing discontent of the proletariat, 
on the one hand, and through its growing power, on the other, the 
industrial revolution prepares a social revolution by the proletariat. 

Question 12: What were the further results of the industrial 
revolution? 

Answer: In the steam-engine and the other machines large-scale 
industry created the means of increasing industrial production in a 

Principles of Communism 347 

short time and at slight expense to an unlimited extent. With this 
facility of production the free competition necessarily resulting from 
large-scale industry very soon assumed an extremely intense 
character; numbers of capitalists launched into industry, and very 
soon more was being produced than could be used. The result was 
that the goods manufactured could not be sold, and a so-called trade 
crisis ensued. Factories had to stand idle, factory owners went 
bankrupt, and the workers lost their bread. Everywhere there was 
the greatest misery. After a while the surplus products were sold, the 
factories started working again, wages went up, and gradually 
business was more brisk than ever. But before long too many 
commodities were again produced, another crisis ensued, and ran 
the same course as the previous one. Thus since the beginning of this 
century the state of industry has continually fluctuated between 
periods of prosperity and periods of crisis, and almost regularly 
every five to seven years a similar crisis has occurred, and every 
time it has entailed the greatest misery for the workers, general 
revolutionary ferment, and the greatest danger to the entire existing 
system. 

Question 13: What conclusions can be drawn from these regularly 
recurring trade crises? 

Answer: Firstly, that although in the initial stages of its develop- 
ment large-scale industry itself created free competition, it has now 
nevertheless outgrown free competition; that competition and in 
general the carrying on of industrial production by individuals have 
become a fetter upon large-scale industry which it must and will 
break; that large-scale industry, so long as it is conducted on its 
present basis, can only survive through a general confusion 
repeating itself every seven years which each time threatens all 
civilisation, not merely plunging the proletarians into misery but also 
ruining a great number of. bourgeois; therefore that either 
large-scale industry itself must be given up, which is utterly 
impossible, or that it absolutely necessitates a completely new 
organisation of society, in which industrial production is no longer 
directed by individual factory owners, competing one against the 
other, but by the whole of society according to a fixed plan and 
according to the needs of all. 

Secondly, that large-scale industry and the unlimited expansion of 
production which it makes possible can bring into being a social 
order in which so much of all the necessities of life will be produced 
that every member of society will thereby be enabled to develop and 
exercise all his powers and abilities in perfect freedom. Thus, 
precisely that quality of large-scale industry which in present society 

produces all misery and all trade crises is the very quality which 
under a different social organisation will destroy that same misery 
and these disastrous fluctuations. 

Thus it is most clearly proved: 

1. that from now on all these ills are to be attributed only to the 
social order which no longer corresponds to the existing conditions; 

2. that the means are available to abolish these ills completely 
through a new social order. 

Question 14: What kind of new social order will this have to be? 

Answer: Above all, it will have to take the running of industry and 
all branches of production in general out of the hands of separate 
individuals competing with each other and instead will have to 
ensure that all these branches of production are run by society as a 
whole, i.e., for the social good, according to a social plan and with the 
participation of all members of society. It will therefore do away with 
competition and replace it by association. Since the running of 
industry by individuals had private ownership as its necessary 
consequence and since competition is nothing but the manner in 
which industry is run by individual private owners, private 
ownership cannot be separated from the individual running of 
industry and competition. Hence, private ownership will also have to 
be abolished, and in its stead there will be common use of all the 
instruments of production and the distribution of all products by 
common agreement, or the so-called community of property. The 
abolition of private ownership is indeed the most succinct and 
characteristic summary of the transformation of the entire social 
system necessarily following from the development of industry, and 
it is therefore rightly put forward by the Communists as their main 
demand. 

Question 15: The abolition of private property was therefore not 
possible earlier? 

Answer: No. Every change in the social order, every revolution in 
property relations, has been the necessary result of the creation of 
new productive forces which would no longer conform to the old 
property relations. Private property itself arose in this way. For 
private property has not always existed, but when towards the end of 
the Middle Ages a new mode of production appeared in the form of 
manufacture which could not be subordinated to the then existing 
feudal and guild property, manufacture, having outgrown the old 
property relations, created a new form of ownership—private 
ownership. For manufacture and the first stage of development of 
large-scale industry, no other form of ownership was possible than 
private ownership and no other order of society than that founded 

Principles of Communism 349 

upon private ownership. So long as it is not possible to produce so 
much that not only is there enough for all, but also a surplus for the 
increase of social capital and for the further development of the 
productive forces, so long must there always be a ruling class 
disposing of the productive forces of society, and a poor, oppressed 
class. How these classes are composed will depend upon the stage of 
development of production. In the Middle Ages, which were 
dependent upon agriculture, we find the lord and the serf; the towns 
of the later Middle Ages show us the master guildsman and the 
journeyman and day labourer; the seventeenth century has the 
manufacturer and the manufactory worker; the nineteenth century 
the big factory owner and the proletarian. It is obvious that hitherto 
the productive forces had not yet been so far developed that enough 
could be produced for all or to make private property a fetter, 
a barrier, to these productive forces. Now, however, when the 
development of large-scale industry has, firstly, created capital 
and productive forces on a scale hitherto unheard of and the 
means are available to increase these productive forces in a short 
time to an infinite extent; when, secondly, these productive forces 
are concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois whilst the 
great mass of the people are more and more becoming prole- 
tarlans, and their condition more wretched and unendurable in 
the same measure in which the riches of the bourgeois increase; 
when, thirdly, these powerful productive forces that can easily 
be increased have so enormously outgrown private property 
and the bourgeois that at every moment they provoke the most 
violent disturbances in the social order—only now has the abolition 
of private property become not only possible but even absolutely 
necessary. 

Question 16: Will it be possible to bring about the abolition of 
private property by peaceful methods? 

Answer: It is to be desired that this could happen, and Communists 
certainly would be the last to resist it. The Communists know only 
too well that all conspiracies are not only futile but even harmful. 
They know only too well that revolutions are not made deliberately 
and arbitrarily, but that everywhere and at all times they have been 
the necessary outcome of circumstances entirely independent of the 
will and the leadership of particular parties and entire classes. But 
they also see that the development of the proletariat is in nearly 
every civilised country forcibly suppressed, and that thus the 
opponents of the Communists are working with all their might 
towards a revolution. Should the oppressed proletariat in the end 
be goaded into a revolution, we Communists will then defend 

the cause of the proletarians by deed just as well as we do now 
by word. 

Question 17: Will it be possible to abolish private property at one 
stroke? 

Answer: No, such a thing would be just as impossible as at one 
stroke to increase the existing productive forces to the degree 
necessary for instituting community of property. Hence, the 
proletarian revolution, which in all probability is impending, will 
transform existing society only gradually, and be able to abolish 
private property only when the necessary quantity of the means of 
production has been created. . 

Question 18: What will te the course of this revolution? 

Answer: In the first place it will inaugurate a democratic constitution 
and thereby, directly or indirectly, the political rule of the 
proletariat. Directly in England, where the proletariat already 
constitutes the majority of the people. Indirectly in France and in 
Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of 
proletarians but also of small peasants and urban petty bourgeois, who 
are only now being proletarianised and in all their political interests 
are becoming more and more dependent on the proletariat and there- 
fore soon will have to conform to the demands of the proletariat. This 
will perhaps involve a second fight, but one that can end only in the 
victory of the proletariat. 

Democracy would be quite useless to the proletariat if it were not 
immediately used as a means of carrying through further measures 
directly attacking private ownership and securing the means of 
subsistence of the proletariat. Chief among these measures, already 
made necessary by the existing conditions, are the following: 

1. Limitation of private ownership by means of progres- 
sive taxation, high inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance by 
collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.), compulsory loans and so 
forth. _ 

2. Gradual expropriation of landed proprietors, factory owners, 
railway and shipping magnates, partly through competition on the 
part of state industry and partly directly through compensation in 
assignations. 

3. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels against 
the majority of the people. 

4. Organisation of the labour or employment of the proletarians 
on national estates, in national factories and workshops, thereby 
putting an end to competition among the workers themselves and 
compelling the factory owners, as long as they still exist, to pay the 
same increased wages as the State. 

Principles of Communism 351 

5. Equal liability to work for all members of society until complete 
abolition of private ownership. Formation of industrial armies, 
especially for agriculture. 

6. Centralisation of the credit and banking systems in the hands of 
the State by means of a national bank with state capital and the 
suppression of all private banks and bankers. 

7. Increase of national factories, workshops, railways, and ships, 
cultivation of all uncultivated land and improvement of land already 
cultivated in the same proportion in which the capital and workers at 
the disposal of the nation increase. 

8. Education of all children, as soon as they are old enough to do 
without the first maternal care, in national institutions and at the 
expense of the nation. Education combined with production. 

9. The erection of large palaces on national estates as common 
dwellings for communities of citizens engaged in industry as well as 
agriculture, and combining the advantages of both urban and rural 
life without the one-sidedness and disadvantages of either. 

10. The demolition of all insanitary and badly built dwellings and 
town districts. 

11. Equal right of inheritance to be enjoyed by illegitimate and 
legitimate children. 

12. Concentration of all means of transport in the hands of the 
nation. 

Of course, all these measures cannot be carried out at once. But 
one will always lead on to the other. Once the first radical onslaught 
upon private ownership has been made, the proletariat will see itself 
compelled to go always further, to concentrate all capital, all 
agriculture, all industry, all transport, and all exchange more and 
more in the hands of the State. All these measures work towards such 
results; and they will become realisable and will develop their 
centralising consequences in the same proportion in which the 
productive forces of the country will be multiplied by the labour of 
the proletariat. Finally, when all capital, all production, and all 
exchange are concentrated in the hands of the nation, private 
ownership will automatically have ceased to exist, money will have 
become superfluous, and production will have so increased and men 
will be so much changed that the last forms of the old social relations 
will also be able to fall away. 

Question 19: Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in 
one country alone? 

Answer: No. Large-scale industry, already by creating the world 
market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially 
the civilised peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens 

to another. Further, in all civilised countries large-scale industry has 
so levelled social development that in all these countries the 
bourgeoisie and the proletariat have become the two decisive classes 
of society and the struggle between them the main struggle of the 
day. The communist revolution will therefore be no merely national 
one; it will be a revolution taking place simultaneously in all civilised 
countries, that is, at least in England, America, France and 
Germany.'** In each of these countries it will develop more quickly 
or more slowly according to whether the country has a more 
developed industry, more wealth, and a more considerable mass of 
productive forces. It will therefore be slowest and most difficult to 
carry out in Germany, quickest and easiest in England. It will also 
have an important effect upon the other countries of the world, and 
will completely change and greatly accelerate their previous manner 
of development. It is a worldwide revolution and will therefore be 
worldwide in scope. 

Question 20: What will be the consequences of the final abolition of 
private ownership? 

Answer: Above all, through society’s taking out of the hands of the 
private capitalists the use of all the productive forces and means of 
communication as well as the exchange and distribution of products 
and managing them according to a plan corresponding to the means 
available and the needs of the whole of society, all the evil 
consequences of the present running of large-scale industry will be 
done away with. There will be an end of crises; the extended 
production, which under the present system of society means 
overproduction and is such a great cause of misery, will then not 
even be adequate and will have to be expanded much further. 
Instead of creating misery, overproduction beyond the.immediate 
needs of society will mean the satisfaction of the needs of all, create 
new needs and at the same time the means to satisfy them. It will be 
the condition and the cause of new advances, and it will achieve these 
advances without thereby, as always hitherto, bringing the order of 
society into confusion. Once liberated from the pressure of private 
ownership, large-scale industry will develop on a scale that will make 
its present level of development seem as paltry as seems the 
manufacturing system compared with the large-scale industry of our 
time. This development of industry will provide society with a 
sufficient quantity of products to satisfy the needs of all. Similarly 
agriculture, which is also hindered by the pressure of private 
ownership and the parcelling of land from introducing the 
improvements already available and scientific advancements, will 
be given a quite new impulse, and place at society’s disposal an 

Principles of Communism 353 

ample quantity of products. Thus society will produce enough 
products to be able so to arrange distribution that the needs of all 
its members will be satisfied. The division of society into various 
antagonistic classes will thereby become superfluous. Not only will it 
become superfluous, it is even incompatible with the new social 
order. Classes came into existence through the division of labour and 
the division of labour in its hitherto existing form will entirely 
disappear. For in order to bring industrial and agricultural 
production to the level described, mechanical and chemical aids 
alone are not enough; the abilities of the people who set these aids in 
motion must also be developed to a corresponding degree. Just as in 
the last century the peasants and the manufactory workers changed 
their entire way of life, and themselves became quite different 
people when they were drawn into large-scale industry, so also will 
the common management of production by the whole of society and 
the resulting new development of production require and also 
produce quite different people. The common management of 
production cannot be effected by people as they are today, each one 
being assigned to a single branch of production, shackled to it, 
exploited by it, each having developed only one of his abilities at the 
cost of all the others and knowing only one branch, or only a branch 
of a branch of the total production. Even present-day industry finds 
less and less use for such people. Industry carried on in common and 
according to plan by the whole of society presupposes moreover 
people of all-round development, capable of surveying the entire 
system of production. Thus the division of labour making one mana 
peasant, another a shoemaker, a third a factory worker, a fourth a 
stockjobber, which has already been undermined by machines, will 
completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to 
go through the whole system of production, it will enable them to 
pass from one branch of industry to another according to the needs 
of society or their own inclinations. It will therefore free them from 
that one-sidedness which the present division of labour stamps on 
each one of them. Thus the communist organisation of society will 
give its members the chance of an all-round exercise of abilities that 
have received all-round development. With this, the various classes 
will necessarily disappear. Thus the communist organisation of 
society is, on the one hand, incompatible with the existence of classes 
and, on the other, the very establishment of this society furnishes the 
means to do away with these class differences. 

It follows from this that the antagonism between town and country 
will likewise disappear. The carrying on of agriculture and industrial 
production by the same people, instead of by two different classes, is 

already for purely material reasons an essential condition of 
communist association. The scattering of the agricultural population 
over the countryside, along with the crowding of the industrial 
population into the big towns, is a state which corresponds only to an 
undeveloped stage of agriculture and industry, an obstacle to all 
further development which is already now making itself very keenly 
felt. 

The general association of all members of society for the common 
and planned exploitation of the productive forces, the expansion of 
production to a degree where it will satisfy the needs of all, the 
termination of the condition where the needs of some are satisfied at 
the expense of others, the complete annihilation of classes and their 
antagonisms, the all-round development of the abilities of all the 
members of society through doing away with the hitherto existing 
division of labour, through industrial education, through change of 

activity, through the participation of all in the enjoyments provided 
by all, through the merging of town and country—such are the riain 
results of the abolition of private property. 

Question 21: What influence will the communist order of society 
have upon the family? 

Answer: It will make the relation between the sexes a purely private 
relation which concerns only the persons involved, and in which 
society has no call to interfere. It is able to do this because it abolishes 
private property and educates children communally, thus destroying 
the twin foundation of hitherto existing marriage—the dependence 
through private property of the wife upon the husband and of the 
children upon the parents. Here also is the answer to the outcry of 
moralising philistines against the communist community of women. 
Community of women is a relationship that belongs altogether to 
bourgeois society and is completely realised today in prostitution. 
But prostitution is rooted in private property and falls with it. Thus 
instead of introducing the community of women, communist 
organisation puts an end to it. 

Question 22: What will be the attitude of the communist 
organisation towards existing nationalities? 

—remains* 

Question 23: What will be its attitude towards existing religions? 

—remains? 

* Apparently this means that the answer remains the same as to Question 21 of the 
“Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith”. See this volume, p. 103.—Ed. 

> See answer to Question 22 of the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith”, 
this volume, p. 103.—Ed. 

Principles of Communism 355 

Question 24: In what way do Communists differ from socialists? 

Answer: The so-called socialists fall into three groups. 

The first group consists of adherents of feudal and patriarchal 
society which has been or is still being daily destroyed by large-scale 
industry, world trade and the bourgeois society they have both 
brought into existence. From the ills of present-day society this 
group draws the conclusion that feudal and patriarchal society 
should be restored because it was free from these ills. Directly or 
deviously, all its proposals make for this goal. Despite all its profes- 
sions of sympathy and its bewailing the misery of the proletariat, this 
group of reactionary socialists will be strongly opposed by the Com- 
munists, because 

1. it is striving after something utterly impossible; 

2. it seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guild-masters 
and the manufacturers, with their retinue of absolute or feudal 
monarchs, officials, soldiers and priests, a society which was indeed 
free from the vices of present society, but brought at least as many 
other evils in its train and did not even hold out the prospect of the 
emancipation of the oppressed workers through a communist 
organisation; 

3. it always gives away its rea] intentions every time the proletariat 
becomes revolutionary and communist, when it immediately allies 
itself with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians. 

The second group consists of adherents of present society in 
whom the evils inseparable from it have awakened fears for its 
survival. They therefore endeavour to preserve present society but 
to remove the evils bound up with it. With this end in view, some of 
them propose measures of mere charity, and others grandiose 
systems of reform which, under the pretext of reorganising society, 
would retain the foundations of present society, and thus present 
society itself. These bourgeois socialists will also have to be continuous- 
ly fought by the Communists, since they work for the enemies of the 
Communists and defend the society which it is the Communists’ aim 
to destroy. 

Finally, the third group consists of democratic socialists, who in the 
same way as the Communists desire part of the measures listed in 
Question ...2 not, however, as a means of transition to communism 
but as measures sufficient to abolish the misery of present society 
and to cause its evils to disappear. These democratic socialists are 
either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently enlightened regard- 
ing the conditions of the emancipation of their class, or they are 

@ The manuscript has a blank space here. See answer to Question 18.— Ed. 

13—-1826 

members of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, until the winning of 
democracy and the realisation of the socialist measures following 
upon it, has in many respects the same interest as the proletariat. 
At moments of action the Communists will, therefore, have to reach 
an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general for 
the time being pursue as much as possible a common policy with 
them, insofar as these democratic socialists do not enter the service 
of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the Communists. It is obvious 
that this common action does not exclude the discussion of differences 
with them. 

Question 25: What is the attitude of the Communists towards the 
other political parties of our day? 

Answer: This attitude differs from country to country.—In 
England, France, and Belgium, where the bourgeoisie rules, the 
Communists still have for the time being a common interest with the 
various democratic parties, which is all the greater the more in the 
socialist measures they are now everywhere advocating the demo- 
crats approach the aims of the Communists, that is, the more clearly 
and definitely they uphold the interests of the proletariat and the 
more they rely on the proletariat. In England, for instance, the 
Chartists, who are all workers, are incalculably nearer to the 
Communists than are the democratic petty bourgeois or so-called 
radicals. 

In America, where a democratic constitution has been introduced, 
the Communists must make common cause with the party that will 
turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interest 
of the proletariat, that is, with the national agrarian reformers.’ 

In Switzerland the radicals, although still a very mixed party, are 
yet the only people with whom the Communists can have anything to 
do, and, further, among these radicals those in the cantons of Vaud 
and of Geneva are the most advanced. 

Finally, in Germany the decisive struggle between the bourgeoisie 
and the absolute monarchy is still to come. Since, however, the 
Communists cannot count on the decisive struggle between them- 
selves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie rules, it is in the 
interests of the Communists to help bring the bourgeoisie to power 
as soon as possible in order as soon as possible to overthrow them 
again. The Communists must therefore always take the side of the 
liberal bourgeois against the governments but they must ever be on 
their guard against sharing the self-deceptions of the bourgeois or 
believing their false assurances about the benefits which the victory 
of the bourgeoisie will bring to the proletariat. The only advantages 
which the victory of the bourgeoisie will provide for the Communists 

Principles of Communism 357 

will be: 1. various concessions which make easier for the Communists 
the defence, discussion and spreading of their principles and thus 
the unification of the proletariat into a closely knit, militant and 
organised class, and 2. the certainty that from the day when the 
absolute governments fall, comes the turn for the fight between 
bourgeois and proletarians. From that day onwards the party policy - 
of the Communists will be the same as in the countries where the 
bourgeoisie already rules.