MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY (Prt

The history of all previous societies is the history of class struggles.^[1]

Freeman and slave, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another. The classes have carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, fight. Sometimes the struggles ended in a revolutionary re-structuring of society. Sometimes, the conflict ended in the common destruction of the struggling classes.

In the earlier periods of history, we almost always see a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, into social rankings. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs. Even these classes are broken down into sub-classes.

The modern bourgeois society that has grown from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class differences. It has simply established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our age, the age of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class differences. Society is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.^[2]

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 and the rounding of the Cape of Africa 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 trade and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, a growth impulse never before known. As a result, the revolutionary segment in the collapsing feudal society, the bourgeoisie, developed rapidly.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, was no longer enough for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed to one side by the manufacturing middle class. Division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meanwhile, the markets kept growing, the demand for goods rising. Even manufacture was no longer enough. Consequently, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires. The millionaires were the leaders of whole industrial armies, they were the modern bourgeoisie.^[3]

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to trade, to navigation, to land travel. This development has, in its time, pushed on the growth of industry. As industry expanded, commerce, navigation, and railways extended. At the same time the bourgeoisie developed and increased its capital. This also had the effect of pushing every class handed down from the Middle Ages into the background.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the way humans have produced and traded.^[4]

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie went along with a political advance of that class. In the Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie was an oppressed class under the power of the feudal nobility. As cities grew, the bourgeoisie became an armed and self-governing association. The bourgeoisie existed in different forms in different countries. It took on one name in independent city-states (as in Italy and Germany) and was taxed heavily as "third estate" in France. Afterwards, in the period when manufacturing became important, the bourgeoisie served either the weak or the absolute monarchy as an ally against the nobility. In fact, the bourgeoisie has usually been the corner-stone of the great monarchies. After all of this, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered power for itself in the modern representative State. The executive branch of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.^[5]

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, and nostalgic relations. It has pitilessly torn apart the feudal ties of loyalty that bound man to his "natural superiors". The bourgeoisie has destroyed any relationship between man and man except that of naked self-interest or of uncaring "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of soupy sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical [self-interested] calculation. It has reduced personal worth into cash exchange value. And in place of personal freedoms, the bourgeoisie has set up that single, terrible freedom -- Free Trade. In a word, the bourgeoisie has made the world safe for exploitation. This exploitation may be veiled by religious and political illusions, but it is still naked, shameless, direct, and brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation previously honored and looked up to. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn sentimental feelings away from the family and has reduced family relationships to money relations.

The bourgeoisie has moved from its brutal display of strength in the Middle Ages, which Reactionaries admire so much, to some impressive creations. 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 [travels] of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production [i.e. things that make things], and consequently the relations of production [the way people combine to make things]. Changing these two things has changed the whole of society. All earlier industrial classes needed the world to stay basically unchanging in order to do well. The bourgeoisie is new and different. It needs constant revolutionizing of production, continuous disturbance of all social rules, and permanent uncertainty to succeed. All fixed relations between people are swept away. All new-formed ones become obsolete before they can take root. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last forced to face his real conditions of life and his relations with his fellow humans.^[6]

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must sneak in everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.^[7]

Through its exploitation of the world-market, the bourgeoisie has given a world-wise character to production and consumption in every country. To the great despair of Reactionaries, it has made industry non-national. Companies no longer reside in just one nation. All old national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are taken over by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations. These new industries no longer work with native raw material, but raw material drawn from places far away. An industry's products are no longer consumed only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.

In place of the old things people wanted, which were satisfied by thing produced locally, we find new wants which require products from distant lands and climates. In place of the old local and national isolation and self-sufficiency, we have trade in every direction. We have the universal inter-dependence of nations. And, as in manufacturing, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. Thinking only of your own nation becomes more and more impossible. From the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.^[8]

By rapidly improving factories, roads, and farms, the bourgeoisie draws even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of the bourgeoisie's goods are the heavy cannons used to batter down Chinese walls. This attack forces the barbarians to surrender despite their intense hatred of foreigners. The weapons of Modern Industry force all nations, on pain of destruction, to adopt the bourgeois way of production. These weapons force Western civilization onto the barbarians. It forces them to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, the bourgeoisie creates a world after its own image.

Closer to home, but just as importantly, the bourgeoisie has made the country follow the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities and has greatly increased the cities' population. The rural [farm] population has moved to the city and this has been good because it rescued a lot of people from the idiocy of farm life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones. It has made farming nations dependent on industrial nations and has made the East dependent on the West.^[9]

The bourgeoisie is concentrating population and factories, and property into small areas [the cities]. At the same time, it has put control of production and property into a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent provinces with separate laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation. Nations now have one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of barely one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations put together. Nature's forces have become the tools of man. The inventions of machinery, chemistry, agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, and electric telegraphs have allowed us to clear whole continents for farming. We have been able to canalize rivers. Whole populations have been conjured out of the ground where they did not exist before.^[10]

The means of production and of exchange that allowed the bourgeoisie to grow were created in feudal society. Yet, as these forces grew, they also slowly undermined feudal society. The feudal organization of farming and industry became obsolete. Feudalism was destroyed by the cancer of Modern Industry which grew within feudal society. Feudalism became a drag of the new ways of trading and producing and feudalism was finally destroyed as a result.^[11]

Into the place of feudalism stepped bourgeois society. This meant economic and political control of society by the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. The way modern bourgeois society organizes production and trade has created such gigantic factories and markets. Yet, the bourgeoisie is like a sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers whom he has called up by his spells. For decades now, the history of industry and commerce has been the history of the revolt of the new productive techniques against the modern conditions of production and against the property laws that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. The main problem is the business cycle. The economy grows and shrinks regularly. Each time the economy shrinks, the entire structure of bourgeois society is increasingly on trial. People ask, is this system really more of a problem than a solution? In these crises, there is a regular destruction of existing products and of the factories that create them. Most basically, the rapid growth of industry under bourgeois control regularly leads to factories producing more than people can buy. Society suddenly finds itself in a state of momentary barbarism. It appears as if a famine or a universal war of devastation had cut off all necessary supplies. People loose their jobs. Industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too many products, too much industry, too much trade.^EXP

The factories and farms society relies upon are becoming a double edged sword for the bourgeoisie. The means of production have become too powerful for the limits of present-day society. Once the way we produce goods shatters the limits of present-day society, the whole of bourgeois society will be in trouble. This coming change will endanger the bourgeoisie's ability to control all of the important property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to control the wealth and productive power created by them.

And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, it enforces destruction of a mass of productive forces. On the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by removing the possibility of preventing future crises.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie destroyed feudalism are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie built the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to use those weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.^[12]

Basically, as the bourgeoisie and capital grows, so grows the modern working class, the proletariat. The proletarians are a class of workers who live only so long as they find work. At the same time, they can only find work if their work increases profits and capital. These workers, who must sell themselves a little bit at a time, are a commodity, like every other article of trade. Worse, they are consequently exposed to all the dangers of competition, to all the changes of the market. If the product they make goes out of fashion, they starve.^[13]

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character. Work is constantly the same, and it is uninteresting. The worker becomes part of the machine. The work he can get requires only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired skills. As a result, the wages necessary to a workman are restricted, almost entirely, to what he requires to stay alive and have kids. Basically, you don't have to pay a worker more than is required to keep him alive. What's worse, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. As the use of machinery and division of labor increases, the nastiness of jobs gets worse. It gets worse because the working day gets longer, work gets more strenuous, the machines speed up, or the job just gets harder.^[14]

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the small business owner into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of workers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. Like privates in an industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this dictatorship proclaims profit to be its end and aim, the more annoying, depressing, and hateful it is.

As skill and physical strength become less important in modern industry, the more men's work can be done by women. Differences of age and sex are no longer important in the working class. Anyone can become a worker, and the cheap labor of women and children can undermine and replace that of men.^[15]

As sooner as a worker receives his wages in cash, he gets jumped by the other parts of the bourgeoisie: the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower levels of the middle class -- the small trades people, the shopkeepers, the artisans, and the better-off peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat. These people fall because they do not have enough capital to compete of the scale of Modern Industry. These lower-middle class people are swamped in the competition with the large capitalists. Another problem is that the individual artisan and farmers specialized skills are rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual workers, then by the work people of a factory. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois way of producing goods, but against the instruments of production themselves. They destroy imported goods that compete with their work. They smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage the workers still form a confused mass scattered over the whole country. These workers don't cooperate because they are competing with each other. Rarely do all of the workers all cooperate, and when they do it is usually because the bourgeoisie organizes them to do so. Sometimes, when the bourgeoisie needs political help, they unify the workers. When this happens, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies. For example, they fight the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, or the small-time bourgeoisie. Thus, leadership is in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory obtained this way is a victory for the bourgeoisie.^[16]

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses. Its strength grows and it feels that strength more. The various interests and life experiences within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more the same. Essentially, machinery obliterates all differences between jobs, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, causes the wages of the workers to go up and down unpredictably. The continuous and rapid improvement of machinery makes the workers' livelihoods more and more uncertain. The disagreements between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of struggles between two classes.

When this happens, the workers begin to form unions to oppose the bourgeois. They group together in order to keep wages high. They create permanent associations in order to prepare for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. Because of the primitive technology of the Middle Ages, it took the bourgeoisie centuries to organize themselves. The modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve organization in a few years.^[17]

This organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It forces the government to recognize workers demands by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hour day bill in England was made law.

Additionally, the collisions between the classes of the old society help the development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle.

The bourgeoisie has had a lot of fights. First it battled kings and noble, then it argued amongst itself, and always it fought with the bourgeoisie of other countries. In all these battles the bourgeoisie has had to ask for help from the proletariat. In asking for this help, the bourgeoisie has dragged the proletariat into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general education. In other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, are being knocked into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.^[18]

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the ruling class seems to be falling apart. In fact, the whole of society seems to be obviously and violently falling apart. Each time a small section of the ruling class cuts itself off of the bourgeoisie and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands, the proletariat. Just as at an earlier period, when a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat. In particular, some of the bourgeois intellectuals who understand what is going to happen join the soon-to-be-triumphant proletariat.

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 the special and essential product of Modern Industry. Industry needs the proletariat, and so creates more and more proletarians. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, and the peasant all fight against the bourgeoisie in order to remain in the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Even worse, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. The only way in which they are revolutionary is that they will eventually be knocked down into 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. Because the unemployed and poor are so desperate, however, they are prepared far more to be a bribed tool of the sneaky bourgeoisie.

At the same time, almost nothing of its old way of life remains in the proletariat. The worker is without property. His relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family. The modern industrial worker has been stripped of all national patriotism. His bad work conditions are the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany. Law, morality, and religion, seem like meaningless bourgeois prejudices to the worker. These three ideas just hide the negative interests of the bourgeoisie.

All the preceding classes that have gotten the upper hand in history have tried to strengthen their position by forcing society at large to follow the way they organize the economy and property law. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by getting rid of the bourgeoisie's old rules. They have no property or control over production to defend. As a result, their mission is to destroy all previous laws that guarantee that private property can be owned by individuals.^[19]

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 raise itself up without the whole social structure of official society being sprung into the air.^[20]

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 hidden civil war. This war is raging within existing society and is near the point where that war breaks out into open revolution. When that happens, the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie will lay the foundation for the control of the proletariat.

Previously, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the struggle between oppressing and oppressed classes. But, in order to oppress a class one must at least make sure that that class is able to continue its slavish existence. It doesn't help if the slave starves. The serf, in the Middle Ages, was able to feed himself and work together in the commune. In the same way, small-time businessmen were able to struggle under the pressures of feudalism to develop into a bourgeois. The modern worker, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper. Eventually, he can no longer even feed himself. He becomes a homeless beggar. Dangerously, homelessness increases 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. It is unfit to press its needs upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is unable to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery. The bourgeoisie cannot help letting workers sink into such a state that the bourgeoisie has to feed the workers instead of being fed by them. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie. In other words, the existence of the bourgeoisie is no longer compatible with society.^[21]

The essential need for the power of the bourgeois class is the growth of capital to invest. To create this capital, the bourgeoisie needs wage labor. Wage labor requires competition between the workers to keep wages down. The advance of industry ends the isolation of the workers by putting them in competition with each other and by putting them together in factories. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and controls products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Workers of the world unit, you have nothing to lose but your chains!

^[1] What does Marx mean that all history is class struggle? [1]

^[2] How was (then - 1850s) modern history different from feudal and earlier history? [2]

^[4] Explain what Marx means in this paragraph. [2]

^[5] What is the relationship between the modern State and the bourgeoisie? [2]

^[6] How does Marx think capitalism has affected religion? Do you agree? [2]

^[7] What affect does the bourgeoisie have on world trade? [1]

^[8] Marx is saying that literature and thinking are now affected by the connections between the whole world. Today this fact is even more true. Give me an example of some international exchange of ideas, art, or music. [2]

^[9] What is the effect of capitalism upon the "barbarian nations"? Why does he use that phrase? [2]

^[10] Why is Marx impressed by capitalism and the bourgeoisie? [1]

^EXP Explanatory Note: In this section, Marx is talking about the fact that in the 19th century, European and US economies were going though severe boom-bust cycles. The economy would grow really fast, producing huge amounts of goods. These goods then piled up faster than they could be sold. The economy broke down for a while and then recovered. Throughout the 19th century, industrial economies grew rapidly, but with severe hiccups of depression. Workers and Farmers tended to get the worst of these periodic (usually 8-10 year) busts.

^[12] What does Marx mean in this paragraph? [2]

^[14] How does Marx describe factory life? Is his description inaccurate? [3]

^[15] Why do women come into the work force? Does Marx think it is a good thing for women to work? [2]

^[16] How does this last paragraph relate to what happened in the French Revolution? [2]

^[17] Marx is making a huge claim here. He is saying that working class people develop a consciousness of themselves as working-class. That is to say that they are conscious that they are members of the proletariat. Do you think that class is the most important consciousness people have of themselves? What are some other possible consciousness? Why does Marx ignore those consciousness? [4]

^[18] Does the proletariat create itself as a class or does the economy create the proletariat? What is the determinism here? [2]

^[19] Why must proletarians seek to destroy private property? [1]

^[20] Do you believe that the proletariat is "the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority"? Why or not? [5]

^[21] Why is the bourgeoisie unfit to rule? [1]