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
on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the
entire bourgeois society.  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 civilisation, 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 inforced 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 labourers, who live only so long
as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour
increases capital.  These labourers, who must sell themselves
piece-meal, 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 division of
labour, 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 his maintenance, and for the propagation of his
race.  But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of
labour, is equal to its cost of production.  In proportion
therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage
decreases.  Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and
division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden
of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working
hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by
increased speed of the machinery, etc.

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the
patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial
capitalist.  Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are
organised 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 over-looker, and, above all, by 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
labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes
developed, the more is the labour 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
labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age
and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer,
so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is
set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord,
the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class--the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, 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 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 labourers, then by
the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade,
in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly
exploits them.  They direct their attacks not against the
bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments
of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that
compete with their labour, 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 labourers 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
bourgeoisie.  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 equalised, in proportion as
machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, 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
unceasing 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 (Trades 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 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 centralise 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 proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few
years.

This organisation 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 England was carried.

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 times, with the
bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees
itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its
help, and thus, to drag it 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, 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 process of dissolution going on within the ruling
class, in fact within the whole range of 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 really 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 so only 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 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 conditions 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
industrial labour, 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 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 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 feudal absolutism, managed to
develop into a bourgeois.  The modern laborer, on the contrary,
instead of rising with the progress 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 over-riding 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 condition for the existence, and for the sway of
the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of
capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour.  Wage-labour
rests exclusively on competition between the laborers.  The
advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie,
replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition,
by their 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, is its own grave-diggers.  Its fall and the victory of
the proletariat are equally inevitable.