Transcript

/give @p written_book{pages:['{"text":"MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY\n\n[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]\n\nA spectre is haunting Europe\u2014the spectre of Communism.\nAll the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to"}','{"text":"exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot,\nFrench Radicals and German police-spies.\n\nWhere is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the"}','{"text":"Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?\n\nTwo things result from this fact."}','{"text":"I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power.\n\nII. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery"}','{"text":"tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.\n\nTo this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French,"}','{"text":"German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.\n\nI. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS\n\nThe history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.\nFreeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,"}','{"text":"guild-master 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"}','{"text":"revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.\n\nIn the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold"}','{"text":"gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, "}','{"text":"subordinate gradations.\n\nThe 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"}','{"text":"forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up"}','{"text":"into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.\n\nFrom the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the"}','{"text":"first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.\n\nThe 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,"}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"tottering feudal society, a rapid development.\n\nThe 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"}','{"text":"manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each "}','{"text":"single workshop.\n\nMeantime 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"}','{"text":"manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each "}','{"text":"single workshop.\n\nMeantime 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"}','{"text":"by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.\n\nModern industry has established the world-market, for"}','{"text":"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 time, reacted on the extension of industry;"}','{"text":"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."}','{"text":"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.\n\nEach step in the development of the "}','{"text":"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 mediaeval commune; here independent urban"}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.\n\nThe bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary "}','{"text":"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,\" "}','{"text":"and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous \"cash payment.\" It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine"}','{"text":"sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable"}','{"text":"freedom\u2014Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.\n\nThe bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and "}','{"text":"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.\n\nThe bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and"}','{"text":"has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.\n\nThe bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting"}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.\n\nThe bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production,"}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.\n\nThe need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle"}','{"text":"everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.\n\nThe bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the "}','{"text":"great chagrin of Reactionists, 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 "}','{"text":"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; "}','{"text":"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 productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"literatures, there arises a world literature.\n\nThe 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 "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.\n\nThe 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 "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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, "}','{"text":"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-"}','{"text":"navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground\u2014what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive "}','{"text":"forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?\n\nWe 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 "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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.\n\nInto their place stepped free competition, "}','{"text":"accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class.\n\nA similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations "}','{"text":"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.\n\nInto their place stepped free competition, "}','{"text":"accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class.\n\nA similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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 on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence "}','{"text":"of the entire bourgeois society. 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 "}','{"text":"epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity\u2014the 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 "}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more"}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more"}','{"text":"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.\n\nThe weapons with which the bourgeoisie "}','{"text":"felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.\n\nBut 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 "}','{"text":"weapons\u2014the modern working class\u2014the proletarians.\n\nIn proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed\u2014a class of labourers, who "}','{"text":"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 piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are "}','{"text":"consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.\n\nOwing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual "}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, "}','{"text":"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 labour increases, in the same"}','{"text":"proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.\n\nModern industry has converted the"}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"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 over-looker,"}','{"text":"and, above all, by 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.\n\nThe less the skill and"}','{"text":"exertion of strength implied in manual labour, 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 "}','{"text":"distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.\n\nNo sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an"}','{"text":"end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.\n\nThe lower strata of the middle class\u2014the small tradespeople,"}','{"text":"shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants\u2014all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is"}','{"text":"carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of"}','{"text":"the population.\n\nThe 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 workpeople of a "}','{"text":"factory, then by the operatives 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 "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"of the Middle Ages.\n\nAt 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 "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.\n\nBut with the development of industry the proletariat not only"}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of "}','{"text":"wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.\n\nNow and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"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,"}','{"text":"achieve in a few years.\n\nThis 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"}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"carried.\n\nAltogether 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"}','{"text":"aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it "}','{"text":"sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political "}','{"text":"and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.\n\nFurther, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, "}','{"text":"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.\n\nFinally, in times when the class struggle "}','{"text":"nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts "}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"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.\n\nOf all the "}','{"text":"classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, 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 "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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 so only in view of their "}','{"text":"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.\n\nThe \"dangerous class,\" the social scum,"}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.\n\nIn the conditions 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"}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.\n\nAll the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"property.\n\nAll previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests"}','{"text":"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.\n\nThough "}','{"text":"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."}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.\n\nHitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed"}','{"text":"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"}','{"text":"commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper "}','{"text":"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 "}','{"text":"ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot"}','{"text":"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."}','{"text":"The essential condition 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"}','{"text":"fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.\n\nWORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS!"}'],title:"The Communist Manifesto",author:"Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels"}Copy