The Communist Manifesto
German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French
criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern
bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of
existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very
things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in
Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons,
professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome
scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets
with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German
working-class risings.
While this “True” Socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for
fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly
represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German
Philistines. In Germany the _petty bourgeois_ class, a _relique_ of the
sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under
various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of
things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in
Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie
threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the
concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a
revolutionary proletariat. “True” Socialism appeared to kill these two
birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric,
steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in
which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry “eternal truths,” all
skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods
amongst such a public. And on its part, German Socialism recognised,
more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the
petty-bourgeois Philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German
petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of
this model man it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation,
the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length
of directly opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism,
and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class
struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and
Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to
the domain of this foul and enervating literature.
2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances,
in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians,
improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity,
members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals,
temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable
kind. This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into
complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon’s _Philosophie de la Misère_ as an example of this
form.
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social
conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting
therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its
revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie
without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in
which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops
this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems.
In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to
march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in
reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of
existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning
the bourgeoisie.
A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this
Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes
of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but
only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic
relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the
material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by
no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of
production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but
administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these
relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations
between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and
simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.
Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when,
it becomes a mere figure of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties:
for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of
the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant
word of bourgeois Socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the
benefit of the working class.
3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern
revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat,
such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends,
made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being
overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then
undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the
economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be
produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone.
The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of
the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated
universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of
Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the
early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between
proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and
Proletarians).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as
well as the action of the decomposing elements, in the prevailing form
of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them
the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any
independent political movement.
Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the
development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does
not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation
of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science,
after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action,
historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and
the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to the
organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future
history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the
practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly
for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering
class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class
does the proletariat exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own
surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far
superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition
of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they
habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class;
nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once
they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan
of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary,
action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and
endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by
the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the
proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a
fantastic conception of its own position correspond with the first
instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of
society.
But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical
element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they
are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the
working class. The practical measures proposed in them—such as the
abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family,
of the carrying on of industries for the account of private
individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social
harmony, the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere
superintendence of production, all these proposals, point solely to the
disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just
cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their
earliest, indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals,
therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.
The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an
inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern
class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic
standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose
all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore,
although the originators of these systems were, in many respects,
revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere
reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their
masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the
proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to
deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They
still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of
founding isolated “phalansteres,” of establishing “Home Colonies,” of
setting up a “Little Icaria”—duodecimo editions of the New
Jerusalem—and to realise all these castles in the air, they are
compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By
degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative
Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic
pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the
miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of
the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from
blind unbelief in the new Gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively,
oppose the Chartists and the “Réformistes.”
IV.
POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING
OPPOSITION PARTIES
Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the
existing working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England and
the Agrarian Reformers in America.
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the
enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the
movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the
future of that movement. In France the Communists ally themselves with
the Social-Democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie,