IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties

Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the
existing working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England
and the Agrarian Reformers in America.

The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims,
for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working
class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent
and take care of the future of that movement.  In France the
Communists ally themselves with the Social-Democrats, against the
conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the
right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and
illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution.

In Switzerland they support the Radicals, without losing sight
of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements,
partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of
radical bourgeois.

In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian
revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that
party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.

In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a
revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal
squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.

But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the
working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile
antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the
German workers may straightaway use, as so many weapons against
the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the
bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy,
and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in
Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately
begin.

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because
that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that
is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions
of European civilisation, and with a much more developed
proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of
France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois
revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately
following proletarian revolution.

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary
movement against the existing social and political order of
things.

In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading
question in each, the property question, no matter what its
degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of
the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by
the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.


           WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!