THE

COMMUNIST PARTY

A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism.

All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to

exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot,

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 hurled 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.

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers

to be itself a Power.

II. 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 Spectre 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.

I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history

of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,

guild-master 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 a revolutionary re-constitution 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 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 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 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 mediaeval commune;

here independent 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, corner-stone 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

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 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 and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that

single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for

exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, 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 expeditions 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.

Conservation 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

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 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 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 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 production, and has

concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence

of this was political centralisation. Independent, 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 agriculture, 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