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DOCUMENT 23-2 I

KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS

From The Communist Manifesto
1848

Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) are credited asthe founders of communism. In formulating their theories, Marx and Engels.drew on the work of earlier economists, particularly Adam Smith and DavidRicardo, and on Thomas Malthus’s demographic theories, as well as theirfamiliarity with living and working conditions in England’s industrial cen-ters. Their Communist Manifesto, first published in London as a pamphlet(written in German), opens with the proclamation that “the history of allhitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The authors predictthe eventual triumph of the working class (proletariat) over the middle class(bourgeoisie) and the establishment of a classless society in which wealth isequally distributed.

A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism. All the powersof old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Arthur P? Mendel,The Essential Works of Marxism (New York: Bantam, 1961), 13-17, 19, 23, 40-44.

Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot,4 French Radicals and Lerman

police-spies… .
Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be

itself a power.
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 nurs-

ery tale of the specter of communism with a Manifesto of the party itself… .

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles… .
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the dis-

covery 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… .
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

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 fervor, 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 a 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 physi-

cian, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, and the man of science into its paid

wage-laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and

has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation… .

4Metternich and Guizot: Prince Klemens von Mettemich (1773-1859) was
foreign

minister and chancellor of the Austrian Empire (1809-1848), and Francois Guizot

(1787-1874) was a French politician who served at a variety of government posts,

including prime minister from 1847 to 1848.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It
has created enormous cities, greatly increased the urban population as
compared with the rural, and thus rescued a considerable part of the pop-
ulation from the idiocy of rural life… .

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarcely one hundred years, has
created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all
preceding generations together… .

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 proletariat.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, develops, in the same
proportión the proletariat, the modern working class, develops — a class of
laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only
so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell
themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of com-
merce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition,
to all the fluctuations of the market.. .

Of all the 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 and essential product… .

The socialist and communist systems properly so called, those of
Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen;5 and others, spring into existence in the early
undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat
and bourgeoisie… .

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the
proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic con-
ception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings
of that class for a general reconstruction of society.

But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical
element. They attack every principle of existing society… .

5Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen: Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon
(1760-1825), was an early advocate of socialism, as was Charles Fourier (1772-1837).
Robert Owen (1771-1858) was an industrialist, utopian socialist, and trade union
advocate. These socialist predecessors believed that capitalists and workers could
overcome their antagonism and work cooperatively for the common good. As Marx
and Engels believed “class struggle” to be the engine that drove history, they imply
that these other socialists were naive to the point of delusionary, hence the “fantastic
pictures” jibe that follows.

The Communists fight for the attainment of the
immediate aims, for

the enforcement of the momentary [i.e., current]
interests of the working

class; but in the movement of the present, they also
represent and take care

of the future of that movement… .

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to
Germany, because

that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that
is bound to be car-

ried out under more advanced conditions of
European civilization, and

with a much more developed proletariat, than that
of England was in the

seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and
because the

bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the
prelude to an immedi-

ately 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 fore, as
the leading question

in each, the property question, no matter
what its degree of development

at the time.
Finally, they labor 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 Communistic

revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but
their chains. They

have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!