The Communist Manifesto
with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when
opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the
bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property.
But in your existing society, private property is already done away
with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is
solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You
reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of
property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the
non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital,
money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised,
_i.e_., from the moment when individual property can no longer be
transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment,
you say individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other
person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property.
This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of
society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate
the labour of others by means of such appropriation.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all
work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the
dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire
nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this
objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no
longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and
appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged
against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating
intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of
class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the
disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the
disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous
majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended
abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions
of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of
the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property,
just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a
law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are
determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal
laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your
present mode of production and form of property—historical relations
that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this
misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.
What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in
the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in
the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this
infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?
On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this
family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things
finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the
proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of
capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by
their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we
replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the
social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct
or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have
not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek
to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education
from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the
hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more
disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties
among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed
into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the
whole bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He
hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common,
and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of
being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the
status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation
of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to
be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists
have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost
from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes,
take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.
Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus,
at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is
that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically
concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is
self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production
must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing
from that system, _i.e_., of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish
countries and nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they
have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political
supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must
constitute itself _the_ nation, it is, so far, itself national, though
not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and
more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom
of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of
production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still
faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is
one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put
an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put
an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the
nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an
end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical,
and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of
serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views
and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every
change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social
relations and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production
is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of
its ruling class.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but
express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new
one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps
even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the
18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death
battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious
liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of
free competition within the domain of knowledge.
“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical and
juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical
development. But religion, morality philosophy, political science, and
law, constantly survived this change.”
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc.
that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes
eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of
constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to
all past historical experience.”
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past
society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms,
antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past
ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No
wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all
the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common
forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the
total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional
property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most
radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the
working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as
to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees,
all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of
production in the hands of the State, _i.e_., of the proletariat
organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive
forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of
despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of
bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear
economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of
the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the
old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely
revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will of course be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be
pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land
to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.