By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
I - Bourgeois and Proletarians
[1]
The history of all hitherto existing society
[2] is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord
and serf, guild-master [3] 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 distinctive 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 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 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 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 the 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 turn, 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 medieval commune [4];
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 no other nexus between
man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment."
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 population, centralised the means
of 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 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 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 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 bourgeoisie 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 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, 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 labuor, 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 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 specialised 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 labourers, then by
the work 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 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 (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 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 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 process of dissolution going on within the ruling
class, in fact within the whole range of the 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 to-day, 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 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 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 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 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 feudal absolutism,
managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, 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 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 labour. Wage labour rests
exclusively on competition between the labourers. 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, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.
Go to the German text of this
chapter.
Go on to the English text of the next
chapter.
Return to the front
page of the Manifesto.
Notes:
[1] By bourgeoisie is meant
the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production
and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage
labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced
to selling their labour power in order to live. [Note by Engels to
the English edition of 1888.]
[2] That is, all written
history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization
existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then,
Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved
it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in
history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have
been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland.
The inner organization of this primitive Communistic society was laid
bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true
nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the
dissolution of the primaeval communities society begins to be differentiated
into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace
this process of dissolution in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums
und des Staats, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Note by Engels
to the English edition of 1888.]
[3] Guild-master, that
is a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Note
by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]
[4] "Commune"
was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even before they had
conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and
political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally speaking,
for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken
as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Note
by Engels to the English edition of 1888] This was the name given
their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they
had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government from
their feudal lords. [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890.]
