By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
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 the 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 lines of march,
the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian
movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same
as that of all 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 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 conditions
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 to keep the labourer 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 communist abolition of buying and
selling, or 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: 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 mode 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 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 intended 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 claptrap about the family and education,
about the hallowed correlation 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
aimed at 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 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 antagonism 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 conception, 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 the 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 eighteenth 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 juridicial 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 relations; no wonder that its development involved
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 class 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 rights 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 obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies,
especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual
abolition of all 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 labor in its present form. Combination of education
with industrial production, etc.
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.
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chapter.
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