The Communist Manifesto
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 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
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 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 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 laborers. 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 bourgeoisie, therefore,
produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory
of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
II.
PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a
whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other
working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat
as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to
shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties
by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the
different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common
interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.
(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the
working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always
and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most
advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every
country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other
hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat
the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the
conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian
movement.
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other
proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class,
overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by
the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on
ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or
that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general
terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from
a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of
existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of
Communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to
historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour
of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of
property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern
bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of
the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on
class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the
right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own
labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal
freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property
of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that
preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the
development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and
is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit.
It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits
wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of
begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property,
in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and
wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social
_status_ in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by
the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the
united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the
property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby
transformed into social property. It is only the social character of
the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, _i.e_., that
quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in
bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer
appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and
reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this
personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that
is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that
leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that
we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this
appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase
capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the
ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase
accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a
means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in
Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society
capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person
is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois,
abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition
of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois
freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of
production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying
disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the
other “brave words” of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a
meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying,