II. Proletarians and Communists

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a
whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other
working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the
proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own,
by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties
by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians
of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front
the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of
all nationality.  (2) In the various stages of development which the
struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass
through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the
movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically,
the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class
parties of every country, that section which pushes forward
all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over
the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly
understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate
general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all
the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into
a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of
political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way
based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or
discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.  They
merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from
an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on
under our very eyes.  The abolition of existing property
relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject
to historical change consequent upon the change in historical
conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in
favour of bourgeois property.

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of
property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But
modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete
expression of the system of producing and appropriating products,
that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the
many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in
the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing
the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a
man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork
of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property!  Do you mean the
property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of
property that preceded the bourgeois form?  There is no need to
abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent
already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer?  Not
a bit.  It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which
exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon
condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh
exploitation.  Property, in its present form, is based on the
antagonism of capital and wage-labour.  Let us examine both sides
of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a
social status in production.  Capital is a collective product,
and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last
resort, only by the united action of all members of society,
can it be set in motion.

Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into
the property of all members of society, personal property is not
thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social
character of the property that is changed. It loses its
class-character.

Let us now take wage-labour.

The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e.,
that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely
requisite in bare existence as a labourer.  What, therefore, the
wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely
suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence.  We by no
means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the
products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the
maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no
surplus wherewith to command the labour of others.  All that we
want to do away with, is the miserable character of this
appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase
capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of
the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase
accumulated labour.  In Communist society, accumulated labour
is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence
of the labourer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present;
in Communist society, the present dominates the past.  In
bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality,
while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the
bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly
so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois
independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of
production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying
disappears also.  This talk about free selling and buying, and
all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in
general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted
selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages,
but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of
buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production,
and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private
property.  But in your existing society, private property is
already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its
existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the
hands of those nine-tenths.  You reproach us, therefore, with
intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary
condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any
property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property.  Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into
capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being
monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can
no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital,
from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no
other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of
property.  This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and
made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the
products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the
power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such
appropriation.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property
all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone
to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who
work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not
work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of
the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when
there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing
and appropriating material products, have, in the same way,
been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and
appropriating intellectual products.  Just as, to the bourgeois,
the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of
production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to
him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous
majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended
abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois
notions of freedom, culture, law, etc.  Your very ideas are but
the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and
bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of
your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential
character and direction are determined by the economical
conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into
eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms
springing from your present mode of production and form of
property--historical relations that rise and disappear in the
progress of production--this misconception you share with every
ruling class that has preceded you.  What you see clearly in the
case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal
property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of
your own bourgeois form of property.

Abolition of the family!  Even the most radical flare up at this
infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family,
based?  On capital, on private gain.  In its completely developed
form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.  But this
state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of
the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of
capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of
children by their parents?  To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations,
when we replace home education by social.

And your education!  Is not that also social, and determined by the
social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention,
direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.?  The
Communists have not invented the intervention of society in
education; they do but seek to alter the character of that
intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the
ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about
the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the
more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all
family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their
children transformed into simple articles of commerce and
instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams
the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.
He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited
in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than
that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the
women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away
with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the
virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women
which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established
by the Communists.  The Communists have no need to introduce
community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters
of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common
prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's
wives.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common
and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly
be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in
substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised
community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the
abolition of the present system of production must bring with it
the abolition of the community of women springing from that
system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish
countries and nationality.

The working men have no country.  We cannot take from them what
they have not got.  Since the proletariat must first of all
acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of
the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far,
itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily
more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the
bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to
uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of
life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still
faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at
least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of
the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another
is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will
also be put an end to.  In proportion as the antagonism between
classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation
to another will come to an end.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a
philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint,
are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas,
views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes
with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in
his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that
intellectual production changes its character in proportion as
material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age
have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do
but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements
of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the
old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old
conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient
religions were overcome by Christianity.  When Christian ideas
succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal
society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary
bourgeoisie.  The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of
conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition
within the domain of knowledge.

"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical
and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of
historical development.  But religion, morality philosophy,
political science, and law, constantly survived this change."

"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice,
etc. that are common to all states of society. But Communism
abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all
morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it
therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."

What does this accusation reduce itself to?  The history of
all past society has consisted in the development of class
antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at
different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all
past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the
other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past
ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays,
moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which
cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of
class antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with
traditional property relations; no wonder that its development
involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the
working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of
ruling as to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by
degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all
instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the
proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the
total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by
means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on
the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures,
therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable,
but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves,
necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are
unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of
production.

These measures will of course be different in different
countries.

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will
be pretty generally applicable.

1.  Abolition of property in land and application of all rents
    of land to public purposes.

2.  A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3.  Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4.  Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5.  Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means
    of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive
    monopoly.

6.  Centralisation of the means of communication and transport
    in the hands of the State.

7.  Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by
    the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and
    the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a
    common plan.

8.  Equal liability of all to labour.  Establishment of
    industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9.  Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries;
    gradual abolition of the distinction between town and
    country, by a more equable distribution of the population
    over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools.
    Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form.
    Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have
disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the
hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power
will lose its political character.  Political power, properly so
called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing
another.  If the proletariat during its contest with the
bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to
organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it
makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force
the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these
conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of
class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have
abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and
class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which
the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all.