Manifesto of the Communist Party Part 1

Manifesto of the Communist Party.

by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

PREFACE

The "Manifesto" was published as the platform of the "Communist League," a workingmen's a.s.sociation, first exclusively German, later on international, and, under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in London in November, 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare for publication a complete theoretical and practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January, 1848, the ma.n.u.script was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French revolution of February 24. A French translation was brought out in Paris, shortly before the insurrection of June, 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney's "Red Republican," London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been published.

The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June, 1848--the first great battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie--drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working cla.s.s. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was again, as it had been before the revolution of February, solely between the different sections of the propertied cla.s.s; the working cla.s.s was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of the Middle-cla.s.s Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested, and, after eighteen months' imprisonment, they were tried in October, 1852. This celebrated "Cologne Communist trial"

lasted from October 4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately after the sentence the League was formally dissolved by the remaining members. As to the "Manifesto," it seemed thenceforth to be doomed to oblivion.

When the European working cla.s.s had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling cla.s.ses, the International Workingmen's a.s.sociation sprang up. But this a.s.sociation, formed with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the "Manifesto." The International was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English Trades' Unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy and Spain, and to the La.s.salleans(a) in Germany. Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working cla.s.s, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes of the struggle against Capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men's minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions of working-cla.s.s emanc.i.p.ation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking up in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it had found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, La.s.salleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative English Trades' Unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with the International, were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their President could say in their name, "Continental Socialism has lost its terrors for us." In fact, the principles of the "Manifesto" had made considerable headway among the workingmen of all countries.

The Manifesto itself thus came to the front again. The German text had been, since 1850, reprinted several times in Switzerland, England and America. In 1872 it was translated into English in New York, where the translation was published in "Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly." From this English version a French one was made in "Le Socialiste" of New York. Since then at least two more English translations, more or less mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakounine, was published at Herzen's "Kolokol" office in Geneva, about 1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulitch, also in Geneva, 1882.

A new Danish edition is to be found in "Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek,"

Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation in "Le Socialiste," Paris, 1886. From this latter a Spanish version was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted; there have been twelve altogether at the least. An Armenian translation, which was to be published in Constantinople some months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator declined to call it his own production. Of further translations into other languages I have heard, but have not seen them. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects, to a great extent, the history of the modern working cla.s.s movement; at present it is undoubtedly the most widespread, the most international production of all Socialist Literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of workingmen from Siberia to California.

Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a _Socialist_ Manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside the working cla.s.s movement and looking rather to the "educated" cla.s.ses for support. Whatever portion of the working cla.s.ses had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough among the working cla.s.s to produce the Utopian Communism, in France of Cabet, and in Germany of Weitling. Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, a middle cla.s.s movement, Communism a working cla.s.s movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, "respectable"; Communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning was, that "the emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s must be the act of the working cla.s.s itself," there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have ever since been far from repudiating it.

The "Manifesto" being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of cla.s.s struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed cla.s.ses; that the history of these cla.s.s struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and the oppressed cla.s.s--the proletariat--cannot attain its emanc.i.p.ation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling cla.s.s--the bourgeoisie--without, at the same time, and once for all, emanc.i.p.ating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, cla.s.s distinctions and cla.s.s struggles.

This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed toward it, is best shown by my "Condition of the Working Cla.s.s in England."(b) But when I again met Marx at Brussels in the spring of 1845, he had it ready worked out, and put it before me, in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.

From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the following:

"However much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct to-day as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and for that reason no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That pa.s.sage would, in many respects, be very differently worded to-day. In view of the gigantic strides of modern industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working cla.s.s; in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that 'the working cla.s.s cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.'

(See 'The Civil War in France; Address of the General Council of the International Workingmen's a.s.sociation,' London, Truelove, 1871, p. 15, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of Socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also, that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV.), although in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.

"But, then, the Manifesto has become a historical doc.u.ment which we have no longer any right to alter."

The present translation is by Mr. Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater portion of Marx's "Capital." We have revised it and I have added a few notes explanatory of historical allusions.

FREDERICK ENGELS.

London, January 30, 1888.

(a) La.s.salle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the "Manifesto."

But in his public agitation, 1862-64, he did not go beyond demanding co-operative workshops supported by State credit.

(b) The condition of the Working Cla.s.s in England in 1844. By Frederick Engels. Translated by Florence K. Wischnewetzky. To be had from the N. Y. Labor News Co., 28 City Hall Place, New York.

MANIFESTO

OF THE

COMMUNIST PARTY.

BY KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS.

A specter is haunting Europe--the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; 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 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 in 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 Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

To this end the Communists of various nationalities have a.s.sembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

I.

BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS.(a)

The history of all hitherto existing society(b) is the history of cla.s.s struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster(c) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconst.i.tution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending cla.s.ses.

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, va.s.sals, guild masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these cla.s.ses, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with cla.s.s antagonisms. It has but established new cla.s.ses, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the cla.s.s antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great cla.s.ses 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 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 close 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 cla.s.s; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the 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 cla.s.s, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world's market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. The market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation and railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. An oppressed cla.s.s under the sway of the feudal n.o.bility, an armed and self-governing a.s.sociation in the medieval commune(d), 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 n.o.bility, 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's 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.