Chapter 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 toshape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class partiesby this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the differentcountries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests ofthe entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle ofthe working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they alwaysand everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advancedand resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, thatsection which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically,they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearlyunderstanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate generalresults of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all otherproletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrowof the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based onideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this orthat would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing froman existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under ourvery eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all adistinctive feature of communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject tohistorical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favourof bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of propertygenerally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeoisprivate property is the final and most complete expression of the systemof 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 thesingle sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing theright 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 propertyof petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that precededthe bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development ofindustry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroyingit daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not abit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting anew supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its presentform, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examineboth sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a socialstatus in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by theunited action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the unitedaction of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, intothe property of all members of society, personal property is not therebytransformed into social property. It is only the social character of theproperty that is changed. It loses its class character.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantumof the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourerin bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriatesby 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 productsof labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproductionof human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labourof others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable characterof this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increasecapital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the rulingclass requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulatedlabour. 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; inCommunist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois societycapital is independent and has individuality, while the living person isdependent 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 ofbourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedomis 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 disappearsalso. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “bravewords” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any,only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fetteredtraders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communisticabolition of buying and selling, of 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 withfor nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solelydue to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproachus, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessarycondition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property forthe 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 intobourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individualityvanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no otherperson than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. Thisperson must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products ofsociety; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate thelabour of others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, allwork will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone tothe 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:that 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 appropriatingmaterial products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communisticmode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to thebourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance ofproduction itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identicalwith 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 abolitionof bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom,culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditionsof your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudenceis but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essentialcharacter and direction are determined by the economical conditions ofexistence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternallaws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your presentmode of production and form of property – historical relations that riseand disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you sharewith every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly inthe 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 bourgeoisform of property.
Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamousproposal 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 familyexists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complementin the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in publicprostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complementvanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children bytheir parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replacehome education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the socialconditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect,of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not inventedthe intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter thecharacter of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influenceof the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowedco-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, themore, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletariansare torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles ofcommerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisiein chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hearsthat the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and,naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being commonto all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do awaywith the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignationof our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to beopenly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists haveno need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of theirproletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, takethe greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.
Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in commonand thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproachedwith is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocriticallyconcealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it isself-evident that the abolition of the present system of production mustbring 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 countriesand nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what theyhave not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire politicalsupremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constituteitself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not inthe bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more andmore vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedomof commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of productionand 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 thefirst conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another willalso be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will alsobe put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes withinthe nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come toan end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophicaland, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of seriousexamination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views,and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every changein the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations andin his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectualproduction changes its character in proportion as material production ischanged? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its rulingclass.
When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do butexpress that fact that within the old society the elements of a new onehave been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps evenpace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religionswere overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18thcentury to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle withthe then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty andfreedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competitionwithin the domain of knowledge.
“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, andjuridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development.But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantlysurvived this change.”
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice,etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolisheseternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead ofconstituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction toall past historical experience.”
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of allpast society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonismsthat assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all pastages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder,then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicityand variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or generalideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearanceof class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditionalproperty relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupturewith 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 workingclass is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to winthe battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees,all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of productionin the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the rulingclass; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by meansof despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions ofbourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economicallyinsufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstripthemselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, andare unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be prettygenerally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to publicpurposes.
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 nationalbank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the handsof 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 thesoil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especiallyfor agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolitionof all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distributionof the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’sfactory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrialproduction, &c, &c.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared,and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast associationof the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of oneclass for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest withthe bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circ*mstances, to organiseitself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the rulingclass, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production,then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditionsfor the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and willthereby 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 thecondition for the free development of all.
Chapter 3: Socialist and Communist Literature
Table of Contents: Manifesto of the Communist Party |Marx-Engels Archive
