Latest / Logic Library / 01 - Bourgeois and Proletarians - The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
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- Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exercise this specter Popenzar, Mettinik and Guizo, 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 hold 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. First, Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power. Second, 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 specter 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. Section one Bourgeois and Proletarians. The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freemen and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman. In a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves. In the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs. In almost all of these classes, again subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch the epoch of the bourgeoisie possesses. However, this distinctive feature it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other, Bourgeoisie and proletariat. From the surfs 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 colonization 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 monopolized 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, demand ever rising, even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized 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 paid the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has in its time 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 bourgeois 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 independent urban republic as in Italy and Germany, there taxable further 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 from 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 modeley feudal ties that bound men 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 fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy waters of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the number less and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom, free trade, in one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political allusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverend awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its page wage laborers. 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 vigor 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 wanders 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 revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them, the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old mode of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing 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 the 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 wholly 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 connections 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 deaf question for all civilized 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 a 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 interdependence 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 civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians intense the 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 civilization 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 to the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois the east on the west. The bourgeois keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent all 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 gener 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, canalization of rivers, hall 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 organization 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 never world, whom he is 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 the periodical return, but 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 creative productive forces are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that in all earlier epochs would have seen an absurdity, the epidemic of over production. Society suddenly finds itself he 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 civilization, 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, enforce destruction of a mass productive forces, on the other, by the conquest of new markets and by the more thorough exploitation of the old wants, 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 felt 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 is also called into existence the men who are to wield these weapons. The modern working class, the proletarians, in proportion as the bourgeoisie i e. Capital is developed in the same proportion as the proletariat. The modern working class developed a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, 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 fluctuations of the market. Owing to the extensive use of machinery and division of labor, the work of the proletariants 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 his maintenance and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to the 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 that the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in the given time, or by increased speed of the machinery, et cetera. Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patrin triarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers crowded into the factory are organized 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 labor 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 labor, more or less expensive to use according to their age and sex. No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash than he is set upon by other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shop keeper, the pawnbroker, et cetera. The lower strata of the middle class, the small tradespeople, shop keepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen, and peasants. All these sink gradually into the prolece pctariat, 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 specialized skill is rendered worthless by the 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 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 enemy of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. 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 equalized 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 makes 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 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 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 centralize 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 proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years. This organization 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, of 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 instruments 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 enlightenment 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 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 to day, the proletariat alone is a real 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, 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 labor, 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 interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interests 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 of 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 him to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, 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 overriding 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 the 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 product. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all is its own grave diggers. It's fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. The end of section one,