By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
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 with the Social Democrats [1] 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 Krakow 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 straightway 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 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 communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing
to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working men of all countries, unite!
Go to the German text of this
chapter.
Return to the front
page of the Manifesto.
Notes:
[1] The party then represented
in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc (1811-82),
in the daily press by the Réforme. The name of Social-Democracy
signifies, with these its inventors, a section of the Democratic or Republican
Party more or less tinged with socialism. [[Note by Engels to the English
edition of 1888]
