gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, 
knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, 
guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,’ serfs; in almost all of these 
classes, again, subordinate gradations. 

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of 
feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but 
established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of 
struggle in place of the old ones. 

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this 
distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as 
a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, 
into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and 
Proletariat. 

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, under 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 manufacture 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 
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 communica- 
tion 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 bour- 
geoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the back- 
ground 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?*; here indepen- 
dent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable “third 
estate” of the monarchy (as in France),‘ afterwards, in the period of 
manufacture 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 bour- 
geoisie. 

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 

* “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. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.] 

This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and 
France, after they had purchased or wrested their initial rights of self-government 
from their feudal lords. [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890.] 

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 free- 
dom—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 Reactionists 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 expedi- 
tions 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. Conserva- 
tion 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 whole surface of the globe. It must 
nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions every- 
where. 

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 
productions 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 proper- 
ty. 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 its 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 means of 
production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The 
necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Indepen- 

dent, 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 agricul- 
ture, 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 to it, and by the economical 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 
bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial 
crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more 
threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. 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 conse- 
quently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the 
fluctuations of the market. 

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, 
the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, 
consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an append- 

age 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 his 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 increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed 
of the 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, and 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 operatives 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 bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical move- 
ment 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 unceasing improvement of machinery, ever 
more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more 
precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individu- 

Manifesto of the Communist Party 493 

al 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 centu- 
ries, the modern proletarians, 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 times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these 
battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for 
its 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 
classes 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 enlighten- 
ment and progress.? 

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, 
the process 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 so only 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”, the social scum, that passively rotting 
mass thrown off by the lowest layers of 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 conditions 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 industrial 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 feudal 
absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern 
labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress 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 condition 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 their 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 bour- 
geoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its 
fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. 

II