Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels
Manifesto of the
Communist Party
(1848)
NOTES: Karl Marx was an economic and
social theorist writing during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. His
collaborator, Frederick Engels, was a factory owner who became an advocate for
Industrial workers due to his own observations of the misery caused by
industrialization. The date of publication is significant: in 1848 a wave of
revolutions rippled through Europe, and Marx and Engels hoped that industrial
workers would take advantage of these revolutions for their own benefit. Some
key terms:
Feudalism: the social system of traditional
Europe, dominated by lords (whose power was based on land ownership), who controlled
the labor of poor peasants
The Bourgeoisie (adjective: Bourgeois): literally “town dweller”
in French, Marx used this word to describe the new class of factory-owners who
in his own day were challenging the old elite of lords for dominance in Europe
The Proletariat: A word meaning the urban poor in
Latin, Marx uses this term to describe the new industrial working class that
was becoming increasingly large, poor, and desperate in his own day.
Study
Questions:
1) Based on this reading, what critiques do you think Marx would
have made of the works of political theorists we discussed earlier in this
class? Pick one - Confucius, Domat, Han Fei, or Machiavelli – and defend your answer with quotes
from Marx and your chosen text.
2) To what degree do you think that Marx is an economic
determinist – in other words, does Marx focus too much on the economy and
ignore other important aspects of human history? Your answer should identify
specific non-economic factors that he ignores (or addresses, depending on how
you want to answer the question).
3) Why do you think that Marx’s prediction of an impending
revolution proved to be incorrect?
4) How useful are Marx’s ideas to understanding the problems
and struggles of our own 21st century?
The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman
and slave, patrician and plebian, 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 reconstitution 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, plebians, 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 distinct feature: it has simplified 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
The feudal system of
industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now
no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing
system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside 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.
Meantime, the markets kept
ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers 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 class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole
industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has
established the world market, for which the discovery of
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 in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the
feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune:
here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable
"third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward, in the
period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute
monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone 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 no other nexus between
people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has
drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious
fervor, 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 indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set
up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted
naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped
of its halo every occupation hitherto honored 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 laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away
from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into
a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed
how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle
Ages, which reactionaries 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 revolutionizing 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 revolutionizing 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
condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly
expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire
surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections 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
reactionaries, 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 civilized 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 production 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 civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy
artillery 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
civilization 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 civilized 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 population, centralized the
means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The
necessary consequence of this was political centralization. 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, canalization or 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 labor?
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 organization 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 in it,
and the economic 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 bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the
commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the
entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these
crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but
also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically
destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier
epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it
appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply
of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much
civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much
commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer
tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the
contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are
fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters,
they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence
of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to
comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over
these crises? On the one hand, by enforced 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
diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the
bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the
bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the
bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called
into existence the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern working
class -- the proletarians.
In proportion as the
bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the
proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who
live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their
labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal,
are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently
exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the
market.
Owing to the extensive use of
machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost
all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He
becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most
monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the
cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of
subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his
race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to
its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the
work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of
machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of
toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the
increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of
machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted
the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the
industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are
organized like soldiers. As privates of the 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 overlooker,
and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more
openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and
exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern
industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of
women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social
validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less
expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation
of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his
wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the
landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the
middle class -- the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen
generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the
proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the
scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition
with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered
worthless by 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 laborers, then
by the work of people of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one
locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They
direct their attacks not against the bourgeois condition of production, but
against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares
that compete with their labor, 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 laborers
still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up
by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact
bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the
union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends,
is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a
time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight
their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute
monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.
Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the
bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
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 conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat
are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all
distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low
level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the
resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more
fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly
developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions
between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the
character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to
form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in
order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order
to make provision beforehand 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 lie 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. And that
union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable
highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways,
achieve in a few years.
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 compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by
taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the
Ten-Hours Bill in
Altogether, collisions
between the classes of the old society further in many ways the course of
development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a
constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions
of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the
progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In
all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to
ask for help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie
itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements 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 class are, by the advance of industry,
precipitated 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.
Finally, in times when the
class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on
within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes
such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class
cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the
future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the
nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes
over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists,
who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the
historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand
face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary
class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern
Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the
small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight
against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions
of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative.
Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of
history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of
their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their
present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place
themselves at that of the proletariat.
The "dangerous
class", the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the
lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the
movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare
it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
In the condition of the
proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The
proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no
longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry
labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in
America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character.
Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which
lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes
that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by
subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The
proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except
by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every
other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure
and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and
insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical
movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The
proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense
majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest
stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without
the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
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 veiled
civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war
breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the
bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of
society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of
oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain
conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its
slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to
membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the
feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on
the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and
deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper,
and pauperism develops 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, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an
overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an
existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him
sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.
Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its
existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois
class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for
capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the
laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie,
replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the
revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern
Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the
bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.
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