by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 
February 1848 


Written: Late 1847; 

First Published: February 1848; 

Source: Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, pp. 98-137; 
Translated: Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, 1888; 

Transcribed: by Zodiac and Brian Baggins; 

Proofed: and corrected against 1888 English Edition by Andy Blunden 2004; 

Copyleft: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1987, 2000, 2010. Pennission is granted to 


Table of Contents 

Editorial Introduction 2 

Preface to The 1872 German Edition 4 

Preface to The 1882 Russian Edition 5 

Preface to The 1883 German Edition 6 

Preface to The 1888 English Edition 7 

Preface to The 1890 German Edition 10 

Preface to The 1892 Polish Edition 12 

Preface to The 1893 Italian Edition 13 

Manifesto of the Communist Party 14 

I. Bourgeois and Proletarians 14 

II. Proletarians and Communists 22 

III. Socialist and Communist Literature 28 

1. Reactionary Socialism 28 

A. Feudal Socialism 28 

B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism 29 

C. German or ?True? Socialism 29 

2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism 31 

3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism 32 

IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties 34 

Letter from Engels to Marx, 24 November 1847 35 

Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 36 

The Principles of Communism 4 1 

Demands of the Communist Party in Germany 55 

The Paris Commune. Address to the International Workingmen?s Association, May 1871 58 

Endnotes 67 



2 


Introduction 


Editorial Introduction 


The ?Manifesto of the Communist Party? was written by Marx and Engels as the Communist 
League?s programme on the instruction of its Second Congress (London, November 29-December 8, 

1 847), which signified a victory for the followers of a new proletarian line during the discussion of the 
programme questions. 

When Congress was still in preparation, Marx and Engels arrived at the conclusion that the final 
programme document should be in the fonn of a Party manifesto (see Engels? letter to Marx of 
November 23-24, 1 847). The catechism fonn usual for the secret societies of the time and retained in 
the ?Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith? and ?Principles of Communism,? was not suitable for 
a full and substantial exposition of the new revolutionary world outlook, for a comprehensive 
formulation of the proletarian movement?s aims and tasks. See also ?Demands of the Communist 
Party in Germany,? issued by Marx soon after publication of the Manifesto, which addressed the 
immediate demands of the movement. 

Marx and Engels began working together on the Manifesto while they were still in London 
immediately after the congress, and continued until about December 1 3 when Marx returned to 
Brussels; they resumed their work four days later (December 17) when Engels arrived there. After 
Engels? departure for Paris at the end of December and up to his return on January 31, Marx worked 
on the Manifesto alone. 

Hurried by the Central Authority of the Communist League which provided him with certain 
documents (e.g., addresses of the People?s Chamber (Halle) of the League of the Just of November 
1846 and February 1847, and, apparently, documents of the First Congress of the Communist League 
pertaining to the discussion of the Party programme), Marx worked intensively on the Manifesto 
through almost the whole of January 1 848. At the end of January the manuscript was sent on to 
London to be printed in the German Workers? Educational Society?s print shop owned by a German 
emigrant J. E. Burghard, a member of the Communist League. 

The manuscript of the Manifesto has not survived. The only extant materials written in Marx?s hand 
are a draft plan for Section III, showing his efforts to improve the structure of the Manifesto, and a 
page of a rough copy. 

The Manifesto came off the press at the end of February 1848. On February 29, the Educational 
Society decided to cover all the printing expenses. 

The first edition of the Manifesto was a 23-page pamphlet in a dark green cover. In April-May 1848 
another edition was put out. The text took up 30 pages, some misprints of the first edition were 
corrected, and the punctuation improved. Subsequently this text was used by Marx and Engels as a 
basis for later authorised editions. Between March and July 1848 the Manifesto was printed in the 
Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, a democratic newspaper of the Gennan emigrants. Already that same 
year numerous efforts were made to publish the Manifesto in other European languages. A Danish, a 
Polish (in Paris) and a Swedish (under a different title: ?The Voice of Communism. Declaration of the 
Communist Party?) editions appeared in 1848. The translations into French, Italian and Spanish made 
at that time remained unpublished. In April 1848, Engels, then in Barmen, was translating the 
Manifesto into English, but he managed to translate only half of it, and the first English translation, 
made by Helen Macfarlane, was not published until two years later, between June and November 1850, 
in the Chartist journal The Red Republican. Its editor, Julian Harney, named the authors for the first 
time in the introduction to this publication. All earlier and many subsequent editions of the Manifesto 
were anonymous. 

The growing emancipation struggle of the proletariat in the ?60s and ?70s of the 19th century led to 
new editions of the Manifesto. The year 1872 saw a new Gennan edition with minor corrections and a 
preface by Marx and Engels where they drew some conclusions from the experience of the Paris 



3 


Introduction 


Commune of 1871. This and subsequent Gennan editions (1883 and 1890) were entitled the 
Communist Manifesto. In 1872 the Manifesto was first published in America in Woodhull &amp; Claflin ?s 
Weekly. 

The first Russian edition of the Manifesto, translated by Mikhail Bakunin with some distortions, 
appeared in Geneva in 1869. The faults of this edition were removed in the 1882 edition (translation 
by Georgi Plekhanov), for which Marx and Engels, who attributed great significance to the 
dissemination of Marxism in Russia, had written a special preface. 

After Marx?s death, the Manifesto ran into several editions. Engels read through them all, wrote 
prefaces for the 1883 German edition and for the 1888 English edition in Samuel Moore?s translation, 
which he also edited and supplied with notes. This edition served as a basis for many subsequent 
editions of the Manifesto in English ? in Britain, the United States and the USSR. In 1 890, Engels 
prepared a further German edition, wrote a new preface to it, and added a number of notes. In 1885, 
the newspaper Le Socialiste published the French translation of the Manifesto made by Marx?s 
daughter Laura Lafargue and read by Engels. He also wrote prefaces to the 1892 Polish and 1893 
Italian editions. 

This edition includes the two earlier versions of the Manifesto, namely the draft ?Communist 
Confession of Faith? and ?The Principles of Communism,? both authored by Engels, as well as the 
letter from Engels to Marx which poses the idea of publishing a ?manifesto,? rather than a catechism. 
The Manifesto addressed itself to a mass movement with historical significance, not a political sect. 

On the other hand, the ?Demands of the Communist Party in Germany? is included to place the 
publication of the Manifesto in the context of the mass movement in Germany at the time, whose 
immediate demands are reflected by Marx in this pamphlet. Clearly the aims of the Manifesto were 
more far-reaching the movement in Germany at the time, and unlike the ?Demands,? was intended to 
outlive the immediate conditions. 

The ?Third Address to the International Workingmen?s Association? is included because in this 
speech Marx examines the movement of the working class manifested in the Paris Commune, and his 
observations here mark the only revisions to his social and historical vision made during his lifetime 
as a result of the development of the working class movement itself, clarifying some points and 
making others more concrete. 



Preface to The 1872 German Edition 


The Communist League, an international association of workers, which could of course be only a 
secret one, under conditions obtaining at the time, commissioned us, the undersigned, at the 
Congress held in London in November 1847, to write for publication a detailed theoretical and 
practical programme for the Party. Such was the origin of the following Manifesto, the 
manuscript of which travelled to London to be printed a few weeks before the February [French] 
Revolution [in 1848]. First published in German, it has been republished in that language in at 
least twelve different editions in Germany, England, and America. It was published in English for 
the first time in 1850 in the Red Republican, London, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and 
in 1871 in at least three different translations in America. The French version first appeared in 
Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848, and recently in Le Socialiste of New York. A 
new translation is in the course of preparation. A Polish version appeared in London shortly after 
it was first published in Germany. A Russian translation was published in Geneva in the sixties 1 . 
Into Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its appearance. 

However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general 
principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, 
some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the 
Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being 
existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at 
the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In 
view of the gigantic strides of Modem Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved 
and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in 
the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the 
first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been 
antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ?the working class 
cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.? 
(See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working 
Men?s Association, 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the 
criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down 
only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition 
parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the 
political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the 
earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated. 

But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to 
alter. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with an introduction bridging the gap from 1 847 
to the present day; but this reprint was too unexpected to leave us time for that. 

Karl Marx &amp; Frederick Engels 

June 24, 1872, London 



Preface to The 1882 Russian Edition 


The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was 
published early in the ?sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol [a reference to the Free 
Russian Printing Flouse]. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) 
only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today. 

What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December 1847) is most 
clearly shown by the last section: the position of the Communists in relation to the various 
opposition parties in various countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It 
was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the 
United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through immigration. Both 
countries provided Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of 
its industrial products. Both were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing 
European system. 

How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North American for a gigantic 
agricultural production, whose competition is shaking the very foundations of European landed 
property - large and small. At the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its 
tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the 
industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now. Both 
circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself. Step by step, the small and 
middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing 
to the competition of giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous 
concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the industrial regions. 

And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the 
European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning to 
awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, 
he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina 2 , and Russia forms the vanguard of 
revolutionary action in Europe. 

The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending 
dissolution of modem bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly 
flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the 
land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though 
greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the 
higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the 
same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? 

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a 
proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian 
common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development. 

Karl Marx &amp; Frederick Engels 

January 21, 1882, London 



Preface to The 1883 German Edition 


The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole 
working class of Europe and America owes more than to any one else - rests at Highgate 
Cemetery and over his grave the first grass is already growing. Since his death [March 14, 1883], 
there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But I consider it all the 
more necessary again to state the following expressly: 

The basic thought running through the Manifesto - that economic production, and the structure of 
society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for the 
political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the 
primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of 
struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various 
stages of social evolution; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the 
exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class 
which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the 
whole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles - this basic thought belongs solely 
and exclusively to Marx. 

I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary that it also stand in front 
of the Manifesto itself. 

Frederick Engels 

June 28, 1883, London 


?This proposition,? I wrote in the preface to the English translation, ?which, in my opinion, is destined to do for 
history what Darwin? s theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years 
before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by my Conditions of the Working Class 
in England. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me 
in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.? [Note by Engels to the Gennan edition of 1890] 



Preface to The 1888 English Edition 


The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working men? s 
association, first exclusively German, later on international, and under the political conditions of 
the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in 
November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete theoretical and 
practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January 1848, the manuscript was sent to the 
printer in London a few weeks before the French Revolution of February 24. A French translation 
was brought out in Paris shortly before the insurrection of June 1848. The first English 
translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney? s Red Republican, 
Fondon, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been published. 

The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 - the first great battle between proletariat and 
bourgeoisie - drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of 
the European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was, again, as it had been 
before the Revolution of February, solely between different sections of the propertied class; the 
working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme 
wing of the middle-class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to 
show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the 
Central Board of the Communist Feague, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested 
and, after eighteen months? imprisonment, they were tried in October 1852. This celebrated 
?Cologne Communist Trial? lasted from October 4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were 
sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately 
after the sentence, the Feague was formally dissolved by the remaining members. As to the 
Manifesto, it seemed henceforth doomed to oblivion. 

When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling 
classes, the International Working Men? s Association sprang up. But this association, formed 
with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and 
America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto. The International 
was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English trade unions, to the 
followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Fassalleans in Germany. 
Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the 
intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and 
mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats 
even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men? s minds the insufficiency of 
their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true 
conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its 
breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found them in 1864. 
Proudhonism in France, Fassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative 
English trade unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with the 
International, were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their 
president [W. Bevan] could say in their name: ?Continental socialism has lost its terror for us.? In 
fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of 
all countries. 


Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of 
the Manifesto. But in his first public agitation, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond demanding co-operative workshops 
supported by state credit. 



Preface to the 1888 English Edition 


The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since 1850, the German text had been reprinted 
several times in Switzerland, England, and America. In 1872, it was translated into English in 
New York, where the translation was published in Woorhull and Claflin?s Weekly. From this 
English version, a French one was made in Le Socialiste of New York. Since then, at least two 
more English translations, more or less mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one of 
them has been reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin, was 
published at Herzen? s Kolokol office in Geneva, about 1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera 
Zasulich, also in Geneva, in 1882. A new Danish edition is to be found in Socialdemokratisk 
Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation in Le Socialiste, Paris, 1886. From this 
latter, a Spanish version was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are 
not to be counted; there have been twelve altogether at the least. An Armenian translation, which 
was to be published in Constantinople some months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because 
the publisher was afraid of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator 
declined to call it his own production. Of further translations into other languages I have heard 
but had not seen. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modem working- 
class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide spread, the most international 
production of all socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working 
men from Siberia to California. 

Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, 
were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in 
England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and 
gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of 
tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social 
grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the 
?educated? classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of 
the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social 
change, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of 
communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working 
class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany. Thus, 
in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. 
Socialism was, on the Continent at least, ?respectable?; communism was the very opposite. And 
as our notion, from the very beginning, was that ?the emancipation of the workers must be the act 
of the working class itself,? there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. 
Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it. 

The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental 
proposition which forms the nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That in every 
historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social 
organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which it is built up, and from that 
which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently 
the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in 
common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and 
exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; That the history of these class struggles forms a series of 
evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class 

- the proletariat - cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class 

- the bourgeoisie - without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large 
from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and class struggles. 

This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin? s theory has 
done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. 
How far I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by my ?Conditions of the 
Working Class in England.? But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it 



9 


Preface to the 1888 English Edition 


already worked out and put it before me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it 
here. 

From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, 1 quote the following: 

?However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five 
years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as 
correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The 
practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, 
everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being 
existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary 
measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, 
be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modem 
Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended 
organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first 
in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the 
proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this 
programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved 
by the Commune, viz., that ?the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready- 
made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.? (See The Civil War in 
France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men? s 
Association 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident 
that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, 
because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the 
Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle 
still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been 
entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the Earth the 
greater portion of the political parties there enumerated. 

?But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no 
longer any right to alter.? 

The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater portion of Marx? s 
?Capital.? We have revised it in common, and I have added a few notes explanatory of historical 
allusions. 

Frederick Engels 
January 30, 1888, London 



Preface to The 1890 German Edition 


Since [the first German preface of 1883] was written, a new German edition of the Manifesto has 
again become necessary, and much has also happened to the Manifesto which should be recorded 
here. 

A second Russian translation - by Vera Zasulich - appeared in Geneva in 1882; the preface to 
that edition was written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately, the original German manuscript has 
gone astray; I must therefore retranslate from the Russian which will in no way improve the text. 
It reads: 


[Reprint of the 1882 Russian Edition ] 

At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: Manifest Kommunistyczny. 
Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, 
Copenhagen, 1885. Unfortunately, it is not quite complete; certain essential passages, which seem 
to have presented difficulties to the translator, have been omitted, and, in addition, there are signs 
of carelessness here and there, which are all the more unpleasantly conspicuous since the 
translation indicates that had the translator taken a little more pains, he would have done an 
excellent piece of work. 

A new French version appeared in 1886, in Le Socialiste of Paris; it is the best published to date. 
From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in El Socialista of Madrid, and 
then reissued in pamphlet form: Manifesto del Partido Communista por Carlos Marx y F. Engels, 
Madrid, Administracion de El Socialista, Pieman Cortes 8. 

As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the manuscript of an Armenian translation 
was offered to a publisher in Constantinople. But the good man did not have the courage to 
publish something bearing the name of Marx and suggested that the translator set down his own 
name as author, which the latter however declined. 

After one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate American translations had been 
repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version at last appeared in 1888. This was my friend 
Samuel Moore, and we went through it together once more before it went to press. It is entitled: 
Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorized English 
translation, edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet 
Street, E.C. I have added some of the notes of that edition to the present one. 

The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with enthusiasm, at the time of its 
appearance, by the not at all numerous vanguard of scientific socialism (as is proved by the 
translations mentioned in the first place), it was soon forced into the background by the reaction 
that began with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally excommunicated 
?by law? in the conviction of the Cologne Communists in November 1852. With the 
disappearance from the public scene of the workers? movement that had begun with the February 
Revolution, the Manifesto too passed into the background. 

When the European workers had again gathered sufficient strength for a new onslaught upon the 
power of the ruling classes, the International Working Men? s Association came into being. Its 
aim was to weld together into one huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and 
America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles laid down in the Manifesto. It was 
bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on the English trade unions, the 
French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish Proudhonists, and the German Lassalleans. This programme 
- the considerations underlying the Statutes of the International - was drawn up by Marx with a 
master hand acknowledged even by the Bakunin and the anarchists. For the ultimate final triumph 



11 


Preface to the 1890 German Edition 


of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon the intellectual development of the 
working class, as it necessarily has to ensue from united action and discussion. The events and 
vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the successes, could not but 
demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy of their former universal panaceas, and make their 
minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for working-class 
emancipation. And Marx was right. The working class of 1874, at the dissolution of the 
International, was altogether different from that of 1864, at its foundation. Proudhonism in the 
Latin countries, and the specific Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out; and even the ten 
arch-conservative English trade unions were gradually approaching the point where, in 1887, the 
chairman of their Swansea Congress could say in their name: ?Continental socialism has lost its 
terror for us.? Yet by 1887 continental socialism was almost exclusively the theory heralded in 
the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent, the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the 
modem working-class movement since 1848. At present, it is doubtless the most widely 
circulated, the most international product of all socialist literature, the common programme of 
many millions of workers of all countries from Siberia to California. 

Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. In 1847, two 
kinds of people were considered socialists. On the one hand were the adherents of the various 
utopian systems, notably the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at 
that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out. On the other, the manifold 
types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social abuses through their various universal 
panaceas and all kinds of patch-work, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, 
people who stood outside the labor movement and who looked for support rather to the 
?educated? classes. The section of the working class, however, which demanded a radical 
reconstruction of society, convinced that mere political revolutions were not enough, then called 
itself Communist. It was still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude 
communism. Y et, it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of utopian communism 
- in France, the ?Icarian? communists of Cabet, and in Germany that of Weitling. Socialism in 
1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, 
on the Continent at least, quite respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And 
since we were very decidedly of the opinion as early as then that ?the emancipation of the 
workers must be the task of the working class itself,? [from the General Rules of the 
International] we could have no hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor 
has it ever occurred to us to repudiate it. 

?Working men of all countries, unite!? But few voices responded when we proclaimed these 
words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the first Paris Revolution in which the proletariat 
came out with the demands of its own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of most 
of the Western European countries joined hands in the International Working Men? s Association 
of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived only nine years. But that the eternal union 
of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is 
no better witness than this day. Because today 3 , as I write these lines, the European and American 
proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, 
under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by 
legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1 866, and again by 
the Paris Workers? Congress of 1889. And today? s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists 
and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united 
indeed. 

If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes! 

Frederick Engels 

May 1, 1890, London 



Preface to The 1892 Polish Edition 


The fact that a new Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto has become necessary gives rise 
to various thoughts. 

First of all, it is noteworthy that of late the Manifesto has become an index, as it were, of the 
development of large-scale industry on the European continent. In proportion as large-scale 
industry expands in a given country, the demand grows among the workers of that country for 
enlightenment regarding their position as the working class in relation to the possessing classes, 
the socialist movement spreads among them and the demand for the Manifesto increases. Thus, 
not only the state of the labour movement but also the degree of development of large-scale 
industry can be measured with fair accuracy in every country by the number of copies of the 
Manifesto circulated in the language of that country. 

Accordingly, the new Polish edition indicates a decided progress of Polish industry. And there 
can be no doubt whatever that this progress since the previous edition published ten years ago has 
actually taken place. Russian Poland, Congress Poland, has become the big industrial region of 
the Russian Empire. Whereas Russian large-scale industry is scattered sporadically - a part round 
the Gulf of Finland, another in the centre (Moscow and Vladimir), a third along the coasts of the 
Black and Azov seas, and still others elsewhere - Polish industry has been packed into a 
relatively small area and enjoys both the advantages and disadvantages arising from such 
concentration. The competing Russian manufacturers acknowledged the advantages when they 
demanded protective tariffs against Poland, in spit of their ardent desire to transform the Poles 
into Russians. The disadvantages - for the Polish manufacturers and the Russian government - 
are manifest in the rapid spread of socialist ideas among the Polish workers and in the growing 
demand for the Manifesto. 

But the rapid development of Polish industry, outstripping that of Russia, is in its turn a new 
proof of the inexhaustible vitality of the Polish people and a new guarantee of its impending 
national restoration. And the restoration of an independent and strong Poland is a matter which 
concerns not only the Poles but all of us. A sincere international collaboration of the European 
nations is possible only if each of these nations is fully autonomous in its own house. The 
Revolution of 1848, which under the banner of the proletariat, after all, merely let the proletarian 
fighters do the work of the bourgeoisie, also secured the independence of Italy, Germany and 
Hungary through its testamentary executors, Louis Bonaparte and Bismarck; but Poland, which 
since 1792 had done more for the Revolution than all these three together, was left to its own 
resources when it succumbed in 1863 to a tenfold greater Russian force. The nobility could 
neither maintain nor regain Polish independence; today, to the bourgeoisie, this independence is, 
to say the last, immaterial. Nevertheless, it is a necessity for the harmonious collaboration of the 
European nations. It can be gained only by the young Polish proletariat, and in its hands it is 
secure. For the workers of all the rest of Europe need the independence of Poland just as much as 
the Polish workers themselves. 

F. Engels 

London, February 10, 1892 



Preface to The 1893 Italian Edition 


Publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party coincided, one may say, with March 18, 
1848, the day of the revolution in Milan and Berlin, which were armed uprisings of the two 
nations situated in the centre, the one, of the continent of Europe, the other, of the Mediterranean; 
two nations until then enfeebled by division and internal strife, and thus fallen under foreign 
domination. While Italy was subject to the Emperor of Austria, Germany underwent the yoke, not 
less effective though more indirect, of the Tsar of all the Russias. The consequences of March 18, 
1848, freed both Italy and Germany from this disgrace; if from 1848 to 1871 these two great 
nations were reconstituted and somehow again put on their own, it was as Karl Marx used to say, 
because the men who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were, nevertheless, its testamentary 
executors in spite of themselves. 

Everywhere that revolution was the work of the working class; it was the latter that built the 
barricades and paid with its lifeblood. Only the Paris workers, in overthrowing the government, 
had the very definite intention of overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But conscious though they 
were of the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither 
the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the mass of French 
workers had as yet reached the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In 
the final analysis, therefore, the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class. In the 
other countries, in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, the workers, from the very outset, did nothing 
but raise the bourgeoisie to power. But in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible 
without national independence Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the 
unity and autonomy of the nations that had lacked them up to then: Italy, Germany, Hungary. 
Poland will follow in turn. 

Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved the way, prepared the 
ground for the latter. Through the impetus given to large-scaled industry in all countries, the 
bourgeois regime during the last forty-five years has everywhere created a numerous, 
concentrated and powerful proletariat. It has thus raised, to use the language of the Manifesto, its 
own grave-diggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to 
achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of 
these nations toward common aims. Just imagine joint international action by the Italian, 
Hungarian, German, Polish and Russian workers under the political conditions preceding 1848! 

The battles fought in 1848 were thus not fought in vain. Nor have the forty- five years separating 
us from that revolutionary epoch passed to no purpose. The fruits are ripening, and all I wish is 
that the publication of this Italian translation may augur as well for the victory of the Italian 
proletariat as the publication of the original did for the international revolution. 

The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism in the past. The first 
capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modem 
capitalist era are marked by a colossal figured: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle 
Ages and the first poet of modem times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. 
Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era? 

Frederick Engels 

London, February 1, 1893 



Manifesto of the Communist Party 


A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have 
entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Mettemich and Guizot, 
French Radicals and German police-spies. 

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in 
power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, 
against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? 

Two things result from this fact: 

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a 
power. 

II. 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 tale of the 
Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself. 

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the 
following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish 
languages. 


I. Bourgeois and Proletarians* 


The history of all hitherto existing society 1 is the history of class struggles. 

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master 1 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 revolutionary 
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. 

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society 
into various orders, a manifold gradation of social ra nk . 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, subordinate gradations. 

i The modem bourgeois society that has sprouted from the mins of feudal society has not done 
away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, 
new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. 


By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modem capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of 
wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are 
reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition] 

' That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded 
history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in 
Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, 
and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from 
India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by 
Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With 
the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic 
classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second 
edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)] 

! Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition] 


15 


Manifesto of the Communist Party 


Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has 
simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great 
hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. 

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these 
burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. 

The 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, 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 tottering feudal society, a rapid development. 

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, 
now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system 
took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; 
division of labour between the different coiporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour 
in each single workshop. 

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer 
sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of 
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by 
industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modem bourgeois. 

Modern industry has established the world market, for 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 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. 

We see, therefore, how the modem bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of 
development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. 

Each step in the development of the 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 medieval commune : here independent urban republic (as in 
Italy and Germany); there taxable ?third estate? of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the 
period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a 
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the 
bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modem Industry and of the world market, 
conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive 
of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole 
bourgeoisie. 

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 tom 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 


This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or 
conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition] ?Commune? 
was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters 
local self-government and political rights as the ?Third Estate.? Generally speaking, for the economical development of 
the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888 
English Edition] 


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Manifesto of the Communist Party 


fervour, 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 
one 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 honoured and 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. 

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family 
relation to a mere money relation. 

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle 
Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting 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 
conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. 

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, 
and thereby the relations of production, 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 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 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 face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his 
relations with his kind. 

i The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire 
surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions 
everywhere. 

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character 
to production and consumption in every country. To the 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 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; 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 production of the country, we find new 
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the 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 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 
literatures, there arises a world literature. 

The 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 civilisation. 
The cheap prices of 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 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 after its own image. 


17 


Manifesto of the Communist Party 


The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, 
has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a 
considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country 
dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the 
civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. 

The 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 population, centralised the means 
of 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 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, 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-navigation, 
railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, 
whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that 
such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? 

We 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 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 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. 

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution 
adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. 

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its 
relations 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 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 modem productive forces 
against modem conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for 
the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that 
by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time 
more threateningly. 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 epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the 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 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 commerce. The 
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the 
conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these 
conditions, by which they 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 comprise the wealth created by them. And how 
does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of 
productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more 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. 


18 


Manifesto of the Communist Party 


The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against 
the bourgeoisie itself. 

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 modem working class - the 
proletarians. 

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the 
proletariat, the modem working class, developed - a class of labourers, who 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 piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and 
are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the 
market. 

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the 
proletarians has lost all individual 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 of production of a workman is 
restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for 
the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, 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 proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the 
working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of 
machinery, etc. 

Modem Industry has converted the 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 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 overlooker, 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. 

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more 
modem industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. 
Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. 
All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. 

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an 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. 

The lower strata of the middle class - the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen 
generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants - all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly 
because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modem Industry is 
carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their 
specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is 
recruited from all classes of the population. 

The 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 factory, then by the operative 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 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 of the Middle Ages. 



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Manifesto of the Communist Party 


At 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 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 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 bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical 
movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory 
for the bourgeoisie. 

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only 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 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 wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing 
improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more 
precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual 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 wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these 
occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots. 

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. 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 modem industry, and 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 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 
modem proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years. 

This 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 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 carried. 

Altogether 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 aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have 
become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign 
countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, 
and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the 
proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes 
the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. 

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the mling class are, by the advance of 
industry, 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. 

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going 
on within the mling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, 
glaring character, that a small section of the mling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the 
revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier 



20 


Manifesto of the Communist Party 


period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the 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. 
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 Modem 
Industry; the proletariat is its special 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 
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 only so in 
view of their 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. 

The ?dangerous class?, [ lumpenproletariat ] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown 
off by the lowest layers of the 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 of a bribed 
tool of reactionary intrigue. 

In the condition 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 no longer anything in 
common with the bourgeois family relations; modem industry labour, modem subjection to 
capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every 
trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, 
behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. 

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify 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 
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 property. 

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. 
The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, 
in the interest 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. 

Though 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. 

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 where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the 
sway of the proletariat. 

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of 
oppressing and oppressed 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 commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the 
yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modem labourer, on the 
contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper 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 ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as 



21 


Manifesto of the Communist Party 


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 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. 

The essential conditions 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 the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary 
promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the 
revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modem Industry, therefore, 
cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates 
products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall 
and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. 


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 co mm on 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 line 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 the modem 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 condition of 
begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is 


23 


Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists 


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 only 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 bourgeois 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 Communistic abolition 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 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. 


24 


Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists 


Y ou 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 appropriations. 

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: 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 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, &amp;c. 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 [. Aufhebung ] 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 the 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 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, &amp;c.? The 
Communists have not invented 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 clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents 
and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modem Industry, all the 


25 


Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists 


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 bourgeoisie in chorus. 
The bourgeois sees 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 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 will also be 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 that 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 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal 



26 


Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists 


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 juridical 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 property 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 degree, all capital from the 
bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, /. e . , of the 
proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total 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 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 liability 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 


27 


Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists 


populace over the country. 

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children?s 
factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial 
production, &amp;c, &amp;c. 

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. 



III. Socialist and Communist Literature 


1. Reactionary Socialism 
A. Feudal Socialism 

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and 
England to write pamphlets against modem bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July 
1830, and in the English reform agitation 4 , these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful 
upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary 
battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration 
period had become impossible.* 

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own 
interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited 
working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new 
masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe. 

In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half 
menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie 
to the very heart?s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend 
the march of modem history. 

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a 
banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats 
of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter. 

One section of the French Legitimists and ?Y oung England? exhibited this spectacle. 

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the 
feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different 
and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modem proletariat never 
existed, they forget that the modem bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of 
society. 

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief 
accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being 
developed which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society. 

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates 
a revolutionary proletariat. 

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in 
ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped 
from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, 
and potato spirits. 1 

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with 
Feudal Socialism. 


Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830). [Note by Engels to the English 
edition of 1888.] 

+ This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates 
cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers 
of potato spirits. The wealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for 
declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock companies. [Note by Engels to the 
English edition of 1888.] 



29 


Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature 


Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity 
declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the 
place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and 
Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the 
heart-burnings of the aristocrat. 

B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism 

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only 
class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois 
society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the 
modem bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and 
commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie. 

In countries where modem civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty 
bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing 
itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, 
however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, 
as modem industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely 
disappear as an independent section of modem society, to be replaced in manufactures, 
agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen. 

In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was 
natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their 
criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the 
standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus 
arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but 
also in England. 

This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of 
modem production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, 
incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of 
capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable min of the 
petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying 
inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the 
dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities. 

In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of 
production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to 
cramping the modem means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old 
property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, 
it is both reactionary and Utopian. 

Its last words are: coiporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture. 

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, 
this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues. 

C. German or ?True? Socialism 

The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure 
of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was 
introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its 
contest with feudal absolutism. 

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seized 
on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into 
Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German 



30 


Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature 


social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed a 
purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the demands 
of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of ?Practical Reason? in 
general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their 
eyes, the laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally. 

The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony 
with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without 
deserting their own philosophic point of view. 

This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, 
by translation. 

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on 
which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed 
this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath 
the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of 
money, they wrote ?Alienation of Humanity?, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois 
state they wrote ?Dethronement of the C ategory of the General?, and so forth. 

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms, 
they dubbed ?Philosophy of Action?, ?True Socialism?, ?German Science of Socialism?, 
?Philosophical Foundation of Socialism?, and so on. 

The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it 
ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt 
conscious of having overcome ?French one-sidedness? and of representing, not true requirements, 
but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human 
Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty 
realm of philosophical fantasy. 

This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its 
poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic 
innocence. 

The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy 
and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest. 

By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to ?True? Socialism of confronting the 
political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against 
liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom 
of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses 
that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German 
Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, 
presupposed the existence of modem bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic 
conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those 
attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany. 

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires, and 
officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie. 

It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with which these same 
governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings. 

While this ?True? Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the German 
bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of German 
Philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then 
constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state 
of things. 



31 


Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature 


To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and 
political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction - on the one hand, 
from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. ?True? 
Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic. 

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of 
sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry 
?eternal truths?, all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst 
such a public. 

And on its part German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic 
representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine. 

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the 
typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic 
interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly 
opposing the ?brutally destructive? tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and 
impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and 
Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul 
and enervating literature. 

2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism 

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the 
continued existence of bourgeois society. 

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of 
the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to 
animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of 
socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems. 

We may cite Proudhon?s Philosophie de la Misere as an example of this form. 

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modem social conditions without the 
struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, 
minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a 
proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; 
and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete 
systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway 
into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within 
the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the 
bourgeoisie. 

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate 
every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political 
reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could 
be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of 
Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, 
an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the 
continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations 
between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, 
of bourgeois government. 


The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to 
dabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical type of this tendency is Mr Karl Gruen. [Note by Engels to 
the Gennan edition of 1890.] 



32 


Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature 


Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure 
of speech. 

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working 
class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only 
seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism. 

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois - for the benefit of the working class. 

3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism 

We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modem revolution, has always given 
voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others. 

The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal 
excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then 
undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its 
emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending 
bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of 
the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and 
social levelling in its crudest form. 

The Socialist and Communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, 
and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle 
between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section I. Bourgeois and Proletarians). 

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the 
decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, 
offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political 
movement. 

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the 
economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the 
emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social 
laws, that are to create these conditions. 

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of 
emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat 
to an organisation of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves 
itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans. 

In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the 
working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most 
suffering class does the proletariat exist for them. 

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists 
of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve 
the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually 
appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. 
For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible 
plan of the best possible state of society? 

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their 
ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the 
way for the new social Gospel. 

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 conception of its own position, correspond with the first 
instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society. 



33 


Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature 


But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every 
principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the 
enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them - such as the 
abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of 
industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of 
social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more superintendence of 
production - all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which 
were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their 
earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian 
character. 

The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to 
historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite 
shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical 
value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, 
in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary 
sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive 
historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to 
deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental 
realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated ?phalansteres?, of establishing ?Home 
Colonies?, or setting up a ?Little Icaria?* - duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem - and to 
realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the 
bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary [or] conservative Socialists 
depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and 
superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science. 

They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, 
according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel. 

The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the 
Reformistes. 


Phalansteres were Socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his Utopia 
and, later on, to his American Communist colony. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.] 

"Home Colonies? were what Owen called his Communist model societies. Phalansteres was the name of the public 
palaces planned by Fourier. Icaria was the name given to the Utopian land of fancy, whose Communist institutions 
Cabet portrayed. [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890.] 



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 against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take 
up a critical position in regard to phases 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 Cracow 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. Fet 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 ! 5 


The party then represented in Parliament by Fedru-Rollin, in literature by Fouis Blanc, in the daily 
press by the Reforme. The name of Social-Democracy signifies, with these its inventors, a section of 
the Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with socialism. [Engels, English Edition 
1888] 



Letter from Engels to Marx, 24 November 1847* 


Paris, 23-24 November 1847 

Dear Marx, 

Not until this evening was it decided that I should be coming. Saturday evening, then, in Ostend, 
Hotel de la Couronne, just opposite the railway station beside the harbour, and Sunday morning 
across the water. If you take the train that leaves between 4 and 5, you?ll arrive at about the 
same time as I do. ... 


Tuesday evening 

Verte [PTO] 

Give a little thought to the ?Confession of Faith.? I think we would do best to abandon the 
catechetical form and call the thing ?Communist Manifesto.? Since a certain amount of history 
has to be narrated in it, the form hitherto adopted is quite unsuitable. I shall be bringing with me 
the one from here, which I did [?Principles of Communism?]; it is in simple narrative form, but 
wretchedly worded, in a tearing hurry. I start off by asking: What is communism? and then 
straight on to the proletariat - the history of its origins, how it differs from earlier workers, 
development of the antithesis between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, crises, conclusions. In 
between, all kinds of secondary matter and, finally, the communists? party policy, in so far as it 
should be made public. The one here has not yet been submitted in its entirety for endorsement 
but, save for a few quite minor points, I think I can get it through in such a form that at least there 
is nothing in it which conflicts with our views. ... 


From MECW Volume 38, p. 146; Written: 24 November 1847; First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. 
Engels und K. Marx, 1913. 



Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith* 


This document is the draft programme discussed at the First Congress of the Communist League in 
London on June 2-9, 1847. 

The Congress was a final stage in the reorganisation of the League of the Just - an organisation of 
German workers and craftsmen, which was founded in Paris in 1836-37 and soon acquired an 
international character, having communities in Gennany, France, Switzerland, Britain and Sweden. 
The activity of Marx and Engels directed towards the ideological and organisational unity of the 
socialists and advanced workers prompted the leaders of the League (Karl Schapper, Joseph Moll, 
Heinrich Bauer), who resided in London front November 1 846, to ask for their help in reorganising 
the League and drafting its new program me. When Marx and Engels were convinced that the leaders 
of the League of the Just were ready to accept the principles of scientific communism as its 
programme they accepted the offer to join the League made to them late in January 1 847. 

Engels? active participation in the work of the Congress (Marx was unable to go to London) affected 
the course and the results of its proceedings. The League was renamed the Communist League, the old 
motto of the League of the Just ?All men are brothers? was replaced by a new, Marxist one: ?Working 
Men of All Countries, Unite! ? The draft programme and the draft Rules of the League were approved 
at the last sitting on June 9, 1847. 

The full text of the ?Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith? (Credo) became known only in 1968. 
ft was found by the Swiss scholar Bert Andreas together with the draft Rules and the circular of the 
First Congress to the members of the League in the archives of Joachim Friedrich Martens, an active 
member of the Communist League, which are kept in the State and University Library in Hamburg. 
This discovery made it possible to ascertain a number of important points in the history of the 
Communist League and the drafting of its programme documents, ft had been previously assumed that 
the First Congress did no more than adopt a decision to draw up a programme and that the draft itself 
was made by the London Central Authority of the Communist League (Joseph Moll, Karl Schapper 
and Heinrich Bauer) after the Congress between June and August 1847. The new documents show that 
the draft was ready by June 9, 1847 and that its author was Engels (the manuscript found in Martens? 
archives, with the exception of some inserted words, the concluding sentence and the signatures of the 
president and the secretary of the Congress, was written in Engels? hand). 

The document testifies to Engels? great influence on the discussion of the programme at the Congress 
? the formulation of the answers to most of the questions is a Marxist one. Besides, while drafting the 
programme, Engels had to take into account that the members of the League had not yet freed 
themselves from the influence of utopian ideas and this was reflected in the formulation of the first six 
questions and answers. The form of a ?revolutionary catechism? was also commonly used in the 
League of the Just and other organisations of workers and craftsmen at the time, ft may he assumed 
that Engels intended to give greater precision to some of the formulations of the programme document 
in the course of further discussion and revision. 

After the First Congress of the Communist League, the ?Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith? 
was sent, together with the draft Rules, to the communities for discussion, the results of which were to 
be taken into account at the time of the final approval of the programme and the Rules at the Second 
Congress. When working on another, improved draft programme, the Principles of Communism, in 
late October 1847, Engels made direct use of the ?Confession of Faith?, as can be seen from the 
coincidences of the texts, and also from references in the Principles to the earlier document when 
Engels had apparently decided to leave fonnulations of some of the answers as they were. 


From MECW Volume 6, p. 92; written by Engels, June 9 1847; first published in Grundungsdokumente des Bundes 
der Kommunisten, Hamburg, 1969, in English in Birth of the Communist Manifesto, International Publishers, 1971. 



37 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


A Communist Confession of Faith 

Question 1 : Are you a Communist? 

Answer: Yes. 

Question 2 : What is the aim of the Communists? 

Answer: To organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop 
and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby 
infringing the basic conditions of this society. 

Question 3/ How do you wish to achieve this aim? 

Answer: By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community 
of property. 

Question 4 : On what do you base your community of property? 

Answer: Firstly, on the mass of productive forces and means of subsistence 
resulting from the development of industry, agriculture, trade and colonisation, 
and on the possibility inherent in machinery, chemical and other resources of their 
infinite extension. 

Secondly, on the fact that in the consciousness or feeling of every individual there 
exist certain irrefutable basic principles which, being the result of the whole of 
historical development, require no proof. 

Question 5: What are such principles? 

Answer: For example, every individual strives to be happy. The happiness of the 
individual is inseparable from the happiness of all, etc. 

Question 6. How do you wish to prepare the way for your community of property? 
Answer: By enlightening and uniting the proletariat. 

Question 1 : What is the proletariat? 

Answer: The proletariat is that class of society which lives exclusively by its 
labour and not on the profit from any kind of capital; that class whose weal and 
woe, whose life and death, therefore, depend on the alternation of times of good 
and bad business;, in a word, on the fluctuations of competition. 

Question 8: Then there have not always been proletarians? 

Answer: No. There have always been poor and working classes; and those who 
worked were almost always the poor. But there have not always been proletarians, 
just as competition has not always been free. 

Question 9: How did the proletariat arise? 

Answer: The proletariat came into being as a result of the introduction of the 
machines which have been invented since the middle of the last century and the 
most important of which are: the steam-engine, the spinning machine and the 
power loom. These machines, which were very expensive and could therefore 
only be purchased by rich people, supplanted the workers of the time, because by 
the use of machinery it was possible to produce commodities more quickly and 
cheaply than could the workers with their imperfect spinning wheels and hand- 
looms. The machines thus delivered industry entirely into the hands of the big 
capitalists and rendered the workers? scanty property which consisted mainly of 
their tools, looms, etc., quite worthless, so that the capitalist was left with 
everything, the worker with nothing. In this way the factory system was 


38 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


introduced. Once the capitalists saw how advantageous this was for them, they 
sought to extend it to more and more branches of labour. They divided work more 
and more between the workers so that workers who formerly had made a whole 
article now produced only a part of it. Labour simplified in this way produced 
goods more quickly and therefore more cheaply and only now was it found in 
almost every branch of labour that here also machines could be used. As soon as 
any branch of labour went over to factory production it ended up, just as in the 
case of spinning and weaving, in the hands of the big capitalists, and the workers 
were deprived of the last remnants of their independence. We have gradually 
arrived at the position where almost all branches of labour are run on a factory 
basis. This has increasingly brought about the ruin of the previously existing 
middle class, especially of the small master craftsmen, completely transformed the 
previous position of the workers, and two new classes which are gradually 
swallowing up all other classes have come into being, namely: 

I. The, class of the big capitalists, who in all advanced countries are in almost 
exclusive possession of the means of subsistence and those means (machines, 
factories, workshops, etc.) by which these means of subsistence are produced. 

This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie. 

II. The class of the completely property less, who are compelled to sell their labour 
to the first class, the bourgeois, simply to obtain from them in return their means 
of subsistence. Since the parties to this trading in labour are not equal, but the 
bourgeois have the advantage, the propertyless must submit to the bad conditions 
laid down by the bourgeois. This class, dependent on the bourgeois, is called the 
class of the proletarians or the proletariat. 

Question 10: In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave? 

Answer: The slave is sold once and for all, the proletarian has to sell himself by 
the day and by the hour. The slave is the property of one master and for that very 
reason has a guaranteed subsistence, however wretched it may be. The proletarian 
is, so to speak, the slave of the entire bourgeois class, not of one master, and 
therefore has no guaranteed subsistence, since nobody buys his labour if he does 
not need it. The slave is accounted a thing and not a member of civil society. The 
proletarian is recognised as a person, as a member of civil society. The slave may, 
therefore, have a better subsistence than the proletarian but the latter stands at a 
higher stage of development. The slave frees himself by becoming a proletarian, 
abolishing from the totality of property relationships only the relationship of 
slaver y. The proletarian can free himself only by abolishing property in general. 

Question 11 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf? 

Answer: The serf has the use of a piece of land, that is, of an instrument of 
production, in return for handing over a greater or lesser portion of the yield. The 
proletarian works with instruments of production which belong to someone else 
who, in return for his labour, hands over to him a portion, determined by 
competition, of the products. In the case of the serf, the share of the labourer is 
determined by his own labour, that is, by himself. In the case of the proletarian it 
is determined by competition, therefore in the first place by the bourgeois. The 
serf has guaranteed subsistence, the proletarian has not. The serf frees himself by 
driving out his feudal lord and becoming a property owner himself, thus entering 
into competition and joining for the time being the possessing class, the privileged 
class. The proletarian frees himself by doing away with property, competition, and 
all class differences. 



39 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


Question 12. In what way does the proletarian differ from the handicraftsman? 

Answer: As opposed to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, who still 
existed nearly everywhere during the last century and still exists here and there, is 
at most a temporary proletarian. His aim is to acquire capital himself and so to 
exploit other workers. He can often achieve this aim where the craft guilds still 
exist or where freedom to follow a trade has not yet led to the organisation of 
handwork on a factory basis and to intense competition. But as soon as the factory 
system is introduced into handwork and competition is in full swing, this prospect 
is eliminated and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. The 
handicraftsman therefore frees himself either by becoming a bourgeois or in 
general passing over into the middle class, or, by becoming a proletarian as a 
result of competition (as now happens in most cases) and joining the movement of 
the proletariat - i. e., the more or less conscious communist movement. 

Question 13: Then you do not believe that community of property has been possible at any time? 
Answer: No. Communism has only arisen since machinery and other inventions 
made it possible to hold out the prospect of an all-sided development, a happy 
existence, for all members of society. Communism is the theory of a liberation 
which was not possible for the slaves, the serfs, or the handicraftsmen, but only 
for the proletarians and hence it belongs of necessity to the 1 9th century and was 
not possible in any earlier period. 

Question 14: Let m go back to the sixth question. As you wish to prepare for community of 

property by the enlightening and uniting of the proletariat , then you reject revolution? 

Answer: We are convinced not only of the uselessness but even of the 
harmfulness of all conspiracies. We are also aware that revolutions are not made 
deliberately and arbitrarily but that everywhere and at all times they are the 
necessary consequence of circumstances which are not in any way whatever 
dependent either on the will or on the leadership of individual parties or of whole 
classes. But we also see that the development of the proletariat in almost all 
countries of the world is forcibly repressed by the possessing classes and that thus 
a revolution is being forcibly worked for by the opponents of communism. If, in 
the end, the oppressed proletariat is thus driven into a revolution, then we will 
defend the cause of the proletariat just as well by our deeds as now by our words. 

Question 15: Do you intend to replace the existing social order by community of Property at one 

stroke? 

Answer: We have no such intention. The development of the masses cannot he 
ordered by decree. It is determined by the development of the conditions in which 
these masses live, and therefore proceeds gradually. 

Question 16: How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of 

Property is to be effected? 

Answer: The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of 
property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic 
constitution. 

Question 17: What will be your first measure once you have established democracy? 

Answer: Guaranteeing the subsistence of the proletariat. 

Question 18: How will you do this? 



40 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


Answer. I. By limiting private property in such a way that it gradually prepares 
the way for its transformation into social property, e. g., by progressive taxation, 
limitation of the right of inheritance in favour of the state, etc., etc. 

II. By employing workers in national workshops and factories and on national 
estates. 

III. By educating all children at the expense of the state. 

Question 19: How will you arrange this kind of education during the period of transition? 
Answer: All children will be educated in state establishments from the time when 
they can do without the first maternal care. 

Question 20: Will not the introduction of community of property be accompanied by the 
proclamation of the community of women? 

Answer: By no means. We will only interfere in the personal relationship between 
men and women or with the family in general to the extent that the maintenance of 
the existing institution would disturb the new social order. Besides, we are well 
aware that the family relationship has been modified in the course of history by 
the property relationships and by periods of development, and that consequently 
the ending of private property will also have a most important influence on it. 

Question 21: Will nationalities continue to exist under communism? 

Answer: The nationalities of the peoples who join together according to the 
principle of community will be just as much compelled by this union to merge 
with one another and thereby supersede themselves as the various differences 
between estates and classes disappear through the superseding of their basis - 
private property. 

Question 22. Do Communists reject existing religions? 

Answer: All religions which have existed hitherto were expressions of historical 
stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But 
communism is that stage of historical development which makes all existing 
religions superfluous and supersedes them. 

In the name and on the mandate of the Congress. 

Secretary: Heide [Alias of Wilhelm Wolff in the League of the Just] 

President: Karl Schill [Alias of Karl Schapper in the League of the Just] 

London, June 9, 1847 



The Principles of Communism* 


In 1 847 Engels wrote two draft programmes for the Communist League in the form of a catechism, 
one in June and the other in October. The latter, which is known as Principles of Communism, was 
first published in 1914. The earlier document ?Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith?, was only 
found in 1968. It was first published in 1969 in Hamburg, together with four other documents 
pertaining to the first congress of the Communist League, in a booklet entitled Grundungs Dokumente 
des Bundes der Kommunisten (Juni bis September 1847) [Founding Documents of the Communist 
League]. 

At the June 1 847 Congress of the League of the Just, which was also the founding conference of the 
Communist League, it was decided to issue a draft ?confession of faith? to be submitted for discussion 
to the sections of the League. The document which has now come to light is almost certainly this 
draft. Comparison of the two documents shows that Principles of Communism is a revised edition of 
this earlier draft. In Principles of Communism, Engels left three questions unanswered, in two cases 
with the notation ?unchanged? ( bleibt ); this clearly refers to the answers provided in the earlier draft. 

The new draft for the programme was worked out by Engels on the instructions of the leading body of 
the Paris circle of the Communist League. The instructions were decided on after Engels? sharp 
criticism at the committee meeting, on October 22, 1847, of the draft programme drawn up by the 
?true socialist" Moses Hess, which was then rejected. 

Still considering Principles of Communism as a preliminary draft, Engels expressed the view, in a 
letter to Marx dated November 23-24 1847, that it would be best to drop the old catechistic form and 
draw up a programme in the form of a manifesto. 

At the second congress of the Communist League (November 29-December 8, 1847) Marx and Engels 
defended the fundamental scientific principles of communism and were trusted with drafting a 
programme in the form of a manifesto of the Communist Party. In writing the manifesto the founders 
of Marxism made use of the propositions enunciated in Principles of Communism. 

Engels uses the term Manufaktur, and its derivatives, which have been translated ?manufacture?, 
?manufacturing?, etc., Engels used this word literally, to indicate production by hand, not factory 
production for which Engels uses ?big industry?. Manufaktur differs from handicraft (guild production 
in mediaeval towns), in that the latter was carried out by independent artisans. Manufacktur is carried 
out by homeworkers working for merchant capitalists, or by groups of craftspeople working together 
in large workshops owned by capitalists. It is therefore a transitional mode of production, between 
guild (handicraft) and modern (capitalist) forms of production. 


Written: October-November 1847; Source: Selected Works, Volume One, p. 81-97, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 
1969; first published: 1914, by Eduard Bernstein in the German Social Democratic Party?s Vorwdrts ! ; translated: Paul 
Sweezy; Transcribed: Zodiac, MEA 1993; marxists.org 1999; proofed and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005. 
Footnotes are from the Chinese Edition of Marx/Engels Selected Works Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1977, with 
editorial additions by marxists.org. 



42 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


The Principles of Communism 
- 1 - 

What is Communism? 

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. 

- 2 - 

What is the proletariat? 

The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not 
draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole 
existence depends on the demand for labor - hence, on the changing state of business, on the 
vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the 
working class of the 19th century. 6 

- 3 - 

Proletarians, then, have not always existed? 

No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been 
poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are 
today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always 
been free unbridled competitions. 

- 4 - 

How did the proletariat originate? 

The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last half 
of the last (18th) century, and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of 
the world. 

This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning 
machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines, 
which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole 
mode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaper 
and better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and 
handlooms. The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and 
rendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.). The result was 
that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This 
marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry. 

Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this 
system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, 
pottery, and the metal industries. 

Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who 
previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of 
labor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the 
individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed 
not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after 
another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and 
weaving had already done. 

But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were 
deprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture 
but also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly 



43 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expenses 
and permitted an elaborate division of labor. 

This is how it has come about that in civilized countries at the present time nearly all kinds of 
labor are performed in factories - and, in nearly all branches of work, handicrafts and 
manufacture have been superseded. This process has, to an ever greater degree, ruined the old 
middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the 
workers; and two new classes have been created which are gradually swallowing up all the others. 
These are: 

(i) The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost 
exclusive possession of all the means of subsistence and of the instruments 
(machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of 
subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie. 

(ii) The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the 
bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their 
support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat. 

- 5 - 

Under what conditions does this sale of the 
labor of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place? 

Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same 
laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition - as we 
shall see, the two come to the same thing - the price of a commodity is, on the average, always 
equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of 
labor. 

But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence 
necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying 
out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the 
price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the 
maintenance of life. 

However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker 
sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the 
industrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities 
than what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than his 
minimum. 

This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big 
industry has taken possession of all branches of production. 

- 6 - 

What working classes were there before the industrial 

revolution? 

The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, 
lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes. 

In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward 
countries and even in the southern part of the United States. 

In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, 
Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there 
were also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. 



44 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


Gradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers who 
were even then employed by larger capitalists. 

- 7 - 

In what way do proletarians differ from slaves? 

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. 

The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may 
be, because of the master?s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire 
bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. 
This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. 

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries. 

The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better 
existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social 
development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave. 

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the 
relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by 
abolishing private property in general. 

- 8 - 

In what way do proletarians differ from serfs? 

The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which 
he gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor. 

The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, 
in exchange for a part of the product. 

The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has 
not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. 

The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes 
a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby 
becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In 
short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The 
proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences. 

- 9 - 

In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen? 

In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywhere 
in the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at most 
temporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can 
often achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not 
yet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition 
But as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishes 
fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a 
proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or entering 
the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now more 
often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., the 
more or less communist movement . 7 



45 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


- 10 - 

In what way do proletarians differ from manufacturing 

workers? 

The manufacturing worker of the 1 6th to the 1 8th centuries still had, with but few exception, an 
instrument of production in his own possession - his loom, the family spinning wheel, a little plot 
of land which he cultivated in his spare time. The proletarian has none of these things. 

The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less 
patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city 
and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. 

The manufacturing worker is tom out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever 
property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian. 

- 11 - 

What were the immediate consequences of the industrial 
revolution and of the division of society into bourgeoisie 

and proletariat? 

First, the lower and lower prices of industrial products brought about by machine labor totally 
destroyed, in all countries of the world, the old system of manufacture or industry based upon 
hand labor. 

In this way, all semi-barbarian countries, which had hitherto been more or less strangers to 
historical development, and whose industry had been based on manufacture, were violently 
forced out of their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities of the English and allowed 
their own manufacturing workers to be mined. Countries which had known no progress for 
thousands of years - for example, India - were thoroughly revolutionized, and even China is now 
on the way to a revolution. 

We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of 
Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year?s time. 

In this way, big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has 
merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere 
and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all 
other countries. 

It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off 
revolution in all other countries - revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the 
liberation of their respective working class. 

Second, wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and 
power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever 
this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto 
mling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. 
The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the 
entailment of estates - in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, 
and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the 
guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition - 
that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the 
only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital. 

The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of 
society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive 
power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. 



46 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only 
condition of society in which big industry can make its way. 

Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also 
destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, 
it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of 
the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of 
free competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these 
constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters - that is to say, only 
members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois 
deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government. 

Third, everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the 
bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be 
employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that 
the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital. 
Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the 
great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses 
in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength. 

Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented, 
the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink to 
their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. The 
growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletarian 
social revolution. 


- 12 - 

What were the further consequences of the industrial 

revolution? 

Big industry created in the steam engine, and other machines, the means of endlessly expanding 
industrial production, speeding it up, and cutting its costs. With production thus facilitated, the 
free competition, which is necessarily bound up with big industry, assumed the most extreme 
forms; a multitude of capitalists invaded industry, and, in a short while, more was produced than 
was needed. 

As a consequence, finished commodities could not be sold, and a so-called commercial crisis 
broke out. Factories had to be closed, their owners went bankrupt, and the workers were without 
bread. Deepest misery reigned everywhere. 

After a time, the superfluous products were sold, the factories began to operate again, wages rose, 
and gradually business got better than ever. 

But it was not long before too many commodities were again produced and a new crisis broke 
out, only to follow the same course as its predecessor. 

Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuated 
between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisis 
has intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by 
general revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things. 

- 13 - 

What follows from these periodic commercial crises? 

First: 

That, though big industry in its earliest stage created free competition, it has now 
outgrown free competition; 



47 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


that, for big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of 
production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter; 

that, so long as big industry remains on its present footing, it can be maintained 
only at the cost of general chaos every seven years, each time threatening the 
whole of civilization and not only plunging the proletarians into misery but also 
ruining large sections of the bourgeoisie; 

hence, either that big industry must itself be given up, which is an absolute 
impossibility, or that it makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization 
of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing 
individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a 
definite plan and taking account of the needs of all. 

Second: That big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, 
bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every 
member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in 
complete freedom. 

It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce 
misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and 
these catastrophic depressions. 

We see with the greatest clarity: 

(i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order 
which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and 

(ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils 
altogether. 

- 14 - 

What will this new social order have to be like? 

Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the 
hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these 
branches of production are operated by society as a whole - that is, for the common account, 
according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society. 

It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association. 

Moreover, since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, 
and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry 
by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated 
from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be 
abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and 
the distribution of all products according to common agreement - in a word, what is called the 
communal ownership of goods. 

In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to 
characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the 
development of industry - and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main 
demand. 



48 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


- 15 - 

Was not the abolition of private property possible at an 

earlier time? 

No. Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary 
consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property 
relations. 

Private property has not always existed. 

When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could 
not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, 
which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. 
And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was 
the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order. 

So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over 
for expanding the social capital and extending the forces of production - so long as this is not 
possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society?s productive forces, and 
a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development. 

The agrarian Middle Ages give us the baron and the serf; the cities of the later Middle Ages show 
us the guildmaster and the journeyman and the day laborer; the 17th century has its 
manufacturing workers; the 19th has big factory owners and proletarians. 

It is clear that, up to now, the forces of production have never been developed to the point where 
enough could be developed for all, and that private property has become a fetter and a barrier in 
relation to the further development of the forces of production. 

Now, however, the development of big industry has ushered in a new period. Capital and the 
forces of production have been expanded to an unprecedented extent, and the means are at hand 
to multiply them without limit in the near future. Moreover, the forces of production have been 
concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois, while the great mass of the people are more and 
more falling into the proletariat, their situation becoming more wretched and intolerable in 
proportion to the increase of wealth of the bourgeoisie. And finally, these mighty and easily 
extended forces of production have so far outgrown private property and the bourgeoisie, that 
they threaten at any moment to unleash the most violent disturbances of the social order. Now, 
under these conditions, the abolition of private property has become not only possible but 
absolutely necessary. 

- 16 - 

Will the peaceful abolition of private property be possible? 

It would be desirable if this could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last to 
oppose it. Communists know only too well that all conspiracies are not only useless, but even 
harmful. They know all too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but 
that, everywhere and always, they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which were 
wholly independent of the will and direction of individual parties and entire classes. 

But they also see that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been 
violently suppressed, and that in this way the opponents of communism have been working 
toward a revolution with all their strength. If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to 
revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we now 
defend them with words. 



49 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


- 17 - 

Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at 

one stroke? 

No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent 
necessary for the creation of a communal society. 

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be 
able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient 
quantity. 

- 18 - 

What will be the course of this revolution? 

Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect 
dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of 
the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of 
proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into 
the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, 
and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a 
second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat. 

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a 
means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood 
of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are 
the following: 

(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance 
taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) 
forced loans, etc. 

(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and 
shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through 
compensation in the form of bonds. 

(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the 
majority of the people. 

(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, 
in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished 
and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the 
same high wages as those paid by the state. 

(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as 
private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, 
especially for agriculture. 

(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national 
ha nk with state capital, and the suppression of all private ha nks and bankers. 

(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; 
bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under 
cultivation - all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the 
disposal of the nation. 

(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother?s 
care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production 
together. 



50 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for 
associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and 
combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while 
avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each. 

(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts. 

(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children bom in and out of wedlock. 

(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation. 

It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring 
others in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the 
proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the 
state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to 
this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing 
effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country?s 
productive forces. 

Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of 
the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and 
production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of 
its old economic habits may remain. 

- 19 - 

Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one 

country alone? 

No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, 
and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is 
independent of what happens to the others. 

Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent 
that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle 
between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not 
merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries - 
that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany. 

It will develop in each of the these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or the 
other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces. 
Hence, it will go slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with the 
fewest difficulties in England. It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, 
and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while 
greatly stepping up its pace. 

It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range. 

- 20 - 

What will be the consequences of the 
ultimate disappearance of private property? 

Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and 
distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in 
accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. 
In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the 
conduct of big industry will be abolished. 

There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is 
overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of 



51 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the 
elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new 
needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the 
stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as 
progress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, 
will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as 
manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of 
industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of 
everyone. 

The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property and 
is held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existing 
improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward 
which will assure to society all the products it needs. 

In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members. 

The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary. 
Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order. The existence of 
classes originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up to 
the present, will completely disappear. For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough to 
bring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities of 
the men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development. 

Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way of 
life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way, 
communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, will 
both require an entirely different kind of human material. 

People will no longer be, as they are today, subordinated to a single branch of production, bound 
to it, exploited by it; they will no longer develop one of their faculties at the expense of all others; 
they will no longer know only one branch, or one branch of a single branch, of production as a 
whole. Even industry as it is today is finding such people less and less useful. 

Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well- 
rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of 
production in its entirety. 

The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory 
worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will 
completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with 
the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response 
to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided 
character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist 
society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed 
faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that 
society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one 
hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class 
differences on the other. 

A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear. The 
management of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classes 
of people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association. 
The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrial 
population into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both 
agriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development. 



52 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the 
forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of 
all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs 
of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the 
capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, 
through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by 
all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country - these are the 
main consequences of the abolition of private property. 

-21 - 

What will be the influence of communist society on the 

family? 

It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only 
the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it 
does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way 
removes the two bases of traditional marriage - the dependence rooted in private property, of the 
women on the man, and of the children on the parents. 

And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the ?community of 
women?. Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and 
which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private 
property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, 
in fact abolishes it. 


- 22 - 

What will be the attitude of communism to existing 

nationalities? 

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of 
community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby 
to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the 
abolition of their basis, private property . 8 

- 23 - 

What will be its attitude to existing religions? 

All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual 
peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which 
makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance . 9 

- 24 - 

How do communists differ from socialists? 

The so-called socialists are divided into three categories. 

[ Reactionary Socialists: ] 

The first category consists of adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been 
destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, 
bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and 
patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, all 
their proposals are directed to this end. 



53 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


This category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears 
for the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists for the 
following reasons: 

(i) It strives for something which is entirely impossible. 

(ii) It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the small 
producers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, and 
priests - a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society 
but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed 
workers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution. 

(iii) As soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and communist, these 
reactionary socialists show their true colors by immediately making common 
cause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians. 

[ Bourgeois Socialists: ] 

The second category consists of adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for its 
future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise. What they want, therefore, is to maintain this 
society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it. 

To this end, some propose mere welfare measures - while others come forward with grandiose 
systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to 
preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society. 

Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for 
the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow. 

[ Democratic Socialists: ] 

Finally, the third category consists of democratic socialists who favor some of the same measures 
the communists advocate, as described in Question 18, not as part of the transition to 
communism, however, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery 
and evils of present-day society. 

These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the 
conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a 
class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives 
rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat. 

It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with 
these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them 
- provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack 
the communists. 

It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences. 

- 25 - 

What is the attitude of the communists to the 
other political parties of our time? 

This attitude is different in the different countries. 

In England, France, and Belgium, where the bourgeoisie rules, the communists still have a 
common interest with the various democratic parties, an interest which is all the greater the more 
closely the socialistic measures they champion approach the aims of the communists - that is, the 
more clearly and definitely they represent the interests of the proletariat and the more they depend 
on the proletariat for support. In England, for example, the working-class Chartists 10 are infinitely 
closer to the communists than the democratic petty bourgeoisie or the so-called Radicals. 



54 


Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 


In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must 
make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie 
and use it in the interests of the proletariat - that is, with the agrarian National Reformers. 11 
In Switzerland, the Radicals, though a very mixed party, are the only group with which the 
communists can co-operate, and, among these Radicals, the Vaudois and Genevese are the most 
advanced. 

In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between the 
bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive 
struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that 
it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order 
the sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists must 
continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the 
bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie 
would allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derive 
from a bourgeois victory would consist 

(i) in various concessions which would facilitate the unification of the proletariat 
into a closely knit, battle-worthy, and organized class; and 

(ii) in the certainly that, on the very day the absolute monarchies fall, the struggle 
between bourgeoisie and proletariat will start. From that day on, the policy of the 
communists will be the same as it now is in the countries where the bourgeoisie is 
already in power. 



Demands of the Communist Party in Germany 


?Demands of the Communist Party in Germany? were written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 
Paris between March 21 (when Engels arrived in Paris from Brussels) and March 24, 1848. This 
document was discussed by members of the Central Authority, who approved and signed it as the. 
political programme of the Communist League in the revolution that broke out in Germany. In March 
it was printed as a leaflet, for distribution among revolutionary German emigrant workers who were 
about to return home. Austrian and German diplomats in Paris informed their respective governments 
about this as early as March 27, 28 and 29. (The Austrian Ambassador enclosed in his letter a copy of 
the leaflet which he dated ?March 25?.) The leaflet soon reached members of the Communist League 
in other countries, in particular, German emigrant workers in London. 

Early in April, the ?Demands of the Communist Party in Germany? were published in such German 
democratic papers as Berliner Zeitungs-Halle (special supplement to No. 82, April 5, 1848), 
Diisseldorfer Zeitung (No. 96, April 5, 1848), Mannheimer Abendzeitung (No. 96, April 6, 1848), 
Trier ?sche Zeitung (No. 97, April 6, 1848, supplement), Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (No. 100, April 
9, 1848, supplement), and Zeitung fur das deutsche Volk (No. 2 1, April 9, 1848). 

Marx and Engels, who left for Germany round about April 6 and some time later settled in Cologne, 
did their best along with their followers to popularise this programme document during the revolution. 
In 1 848 and 1 849 it was repeatedly published in the periodical press and in leaflet form. Not later than 
September 10, 1848, the ?Demands? were printed in Cologne as a leaflet for circulation by the 
Cologne Workers? Association both in the town itself and in a number of districts of Rhenish Prussia. 
In addition to minor stylistic changes, point 1 0 in the text of the leaflet was worded differently from 
that published in March- April 1848. At the Second Democratic Congress held in Berlin in October 
1848, Friedrich Beust, delegate from the Cologne Workers? Association, spoke, on behalf of the social 
question commission, in favour of adopting a programme of action closely following the ?Demands?. 
In November and December 1848, various points of the ?Demands? were discussed at meetings of the 
Cologne Workers? Association. Many editions of the ?Demands? published during the revolution and 
after its defeat have survived to this day in their original form, some of them as copies kept in the 
police archives. 

At the end of 1848 or the beginning of 1849 an abridged version of the ?Demands? was published in 
pamphlet form by Weller Publishers in Leipzig. The slogan at the beginning of the document, the 
second paragraph of point 9 and the last sentence of point 10 were omitted, and the words ?The 
Committee? were not included among the signatories. In 1853, an abridged version of the ?Demands? 
was printed, together with other documents of the Communist League, in the first part of the book Die 
Communisten-Verschworungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts published in Berlin for purposes of 
information by Wermuth and Stieber, two police officials, who staged a trial against the Communists 
in Cologne in 1852. Later Engels reproduced the main points of the ?Demands? in his essay On the 
History of the Communist League, published in November 1885 in the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, and 
as an introduction to the pamphlet: K. Marx, Enthiillungen iiber den Kommunisten Prozess zu Koln, 
Hottingen-Zurich, 1885. 

English translations of the ?Demands of the Communist Party in Germany? appeared in the 
collections: The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with an introduction and 
explanatory notes by D. Ryazanoff, Martin Lawrence, London (1930); K. Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 
II, ed. V. Adoratsky, Moscow-Leningrad, Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the 
USSR (1936); ibid., New York (1 936); Birth of the Communist Manifesto, edited and annotated, with 
an Introduction by D. J. Struik, International Publishers, New York, 197 1, and in other publications. 

The text is from From MECW Volume 7, p. 3. 



56 


Demands of the Communist Party in Germany 


Demands of the Communist Party in Germany 

?Workers of all countries, unite!? 

1. The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic. 

2. Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and to be elected, 
provided he has not been convicted of a criminal offence. 

3. Representatives of the people shall receive payment so that workers, too, shall be able to 
become members of the German parliament. 

4. Universal arming of the people. In future the armies shall be simultaneously labour armies, so 
that the troops shall not, as formerly, merely consume, but shall produce more than is necessary 
for their upkeep. 

This will moreover be conducive to the organisation of labour. 

5. Legal services shall be free of charge. 

6. All feudal obligations, dues, corvees, tithes etc., which have hitherto weighed upon the rural 
population, shall be abolished without compensation. 

7. Princely and other feudal estates, together with mines, pits, and so forth, shall become the 
property of the state. The estates shall be cultivated on a large scale and with the most up-to-date 
scientific devices in the interests of the whole of society. 

8. Mortgages on peasant lands shall be declared the property of the state. Interest on such 
mortgages shall be paid by the peasants to the state. 

9. In localities where the tenant system is developed, the land rent or the quit-rent shall be paid to 
the state as a tax. 

The measures specified in Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 9 are to be adopted in order to reduce the communal 
and other burdens hitherto imposed upon the peasants and small tenant farmers without curtailing 
the means available for defraying state expenses and without imperilling production. 

The landowner in the strict sense, who is neither a peasant nor a tenant farmer, has no share in 
production. Consumption on his part is, therefore, nothing but abuse. 

10. A state bank, whose paper issues are legal tender, shall replace all private banks. 

This measure will make it possible to regulate the credit system in the interest of the people as a 
whole, and will thus undermine the dominion of the big financial magnates. Further, by gradually 
substituting paper money for gold and silver coin, the universal means of exchange (that 
indispensable prerequisite of bourgeois trade and commerce) will be cheapened, and gold and 
silver will be set free for use in foreign trade. Finally, this measure is necessary in order to bind 
the interests of the conservative bourgeoisie to the Government. 

11. All the means of transport, railways, canals, steamships, roads, the posts etc. shall be taken 
over by the state. They shall become the property of the state and shall be placed free at the 
disposal of the impecunious classes. 

12. All civil servants shall receive the same salary, the only exception being that civil servants 
who have a family to support and who therefore have greater requirements, shall receive a higher 
salary. 

13. Complete separation of Church and State. The clergy of every denomination shall be paid 
only by the voluntary contributions of their congregations. 

14. The right of inheritance to be curtailed. 



57 


Demands of the Communist Party in Germany 


15. The introduction of steeply graduated taxes, and the abolition of taxes on articles of 
consumption. 

16. Inauguration of national workshops. The state guarantees a livelihood to all workers and 
provides for those who are incapacitated for work. 

17. Universal and free education of the people. 

It is to the interest of the German proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie and the small peasants to 
support these demands with all possible energy. Only by the realisation of these demands will the 
millions in Germany, who have hitherto been exploited by a handful of persons and whom the 
exploiters would like to keep in further subjection, win the rights and attain to that power to 
which they are entitled as the producers of all wealth. 

The Committee 

Karl Marx, Karl Schapper, H. Bauer, F. Engels, J. Moll, W. Wolff 



The Paris Commune. 

Address to the International Workingmen?s Association, May 1871 


The ?Paris Commune? was composed by Karl Marx as an address to the General Council of the 
International, and included in a book, ?The Civil War in France,? with the aim of distributing to 
workers of all countries a clear understanding of the character and world-wide significance of the 
heroic struggle of the Communards and their historical experience to learn from. The book was widely 
circulated by 1872 it was translated into several languages and published throughout Europe and the 
United States. 

The first address was delivered on July 23rd, 1870, five days after the beginning of the Franco- 
Prussian War. The second address, delivered on September 9, 1870, gave a historical overview of the 
events a week after the army of Bonaparte was defeated. The third address, delivered on May 30, 

1871, two days after the defeat of the Paris Commune - detailed the significance and the underlining 
causes of the first workers government ever created. 

The Civil War in France was originally published by Marx as only the third address, only the first 
half of which is reproduced here. In 1891, on the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels 
put together a new collection of the work. Engels decided to include the first two addresses that 
Marx made to the International. 

The Address is included here because it can be regarded as an amendment to the Manifesto, 
clarifying a number of issues relating to the state based on the experience of the Commune. 


On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of ?Vive la Commune!? What is the 
Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind? 

?The proletarians of Paris,? said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, ?amidst the 
failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to 
save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have 
understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of 
their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.? 

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield 
it for its own purposes. 

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, 
clergy, and judicature - organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of 
labor - originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent bourgeois society as a 
mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all 
manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, 
and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century 
swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last 
hindrances to the superstructure of the modem state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself 
the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi- feudal Europe against modern France. 

During the subsequent regimes, the government, placed under parliamentary control - that is, 
under the direct control of the propertied classes - became not only a hotbed of huge national 
debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it became 
not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; 
but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the 
same pace at which the progress of modem industry developed, widened, intensified the class 
antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of 
the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an 
engine of class despotism. 



59 


Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive 
character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief. The Revolution of 1830, 
resulting in the transfer of government from the landlords to the capitalists, transferred it from the 
more remote to the more direct antagonists of the working men. The bourgeois republicans, who, 
in the name of the February Revolution, took the state power, used it for the June [1848] 
massacres, in order to convince the working class that ?social? republic means the republic 
entrusting their social subjection, and in order to convince the royalist bulk of the bourgeois and 
landlord class that they might safely leave the cares and emoluments of government to the 
bourgeois ?republicans.? 

However, after their one heroic exploit of June, the bourgeois republicans had, from the front, to 
fall back to the rear of the ?Party of Order? - a combination formed by all the rival fractions and 
factions of the appropriating classes. The proper form of their joint-stock government was the 
parliamentary republic, with Louis Bonaparte for its president. Theirs was a regime of avowed 
class terrorism and deliberate insult towards the ?vile multitude.? 

If the parliamentary republic, as M. Thiers said, ?divided them [the different fractions of the 
ruling class] least,? it opened an abyss between that class and the whole body of society outside 
their spare ranks. The restraints by which their own divisions had under former regimes still 
checked the state power, were removed by their union; and in view of the threatening upheaval of 
the proletariat, they now used that state power mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national war 
engine of capital against labor. 

In their uninterrupted crusade against the producing masses, they were, however, bound not only 
to invest the executive with continually increased powers of repression, but at the same time to 
divest their own parliamentary stronghold - the National Assembly - one by one, of all its own 
means of defence against the Executive. The Executive, in the person of Louis Bonaparte, turned 
them out. The natural offspring of the ?Party of Order? republic was the Second Empire. 

The empire, with the coup d?etat for its birth certificate, universal suffrage for its sanction, and 
the sword for its sceptre, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers not 
directly involved in the struggle of capital and labor. It professed to save the working class by 
breaking down parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of government to the 
propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic 
supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all 
the chimera of national glory. 

In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already 
lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation. It was acclaimed 
throughout the world as the savior of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from 
political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce 
expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery 
of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury. 
The state power, apparently soaring high above society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions. 
Its own rottenness, and the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare by the bayonet of 
Prussia, herself eagerly bent upon transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris to 
Berlin. Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the state 
power which nascent bourgeois society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own 
emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed 
into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital. 

The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of ?social republic,? with which 
the February [1848] Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague 
aspiration after a republic that was not only to supercede the monarchical form of class rule, but 
class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic. 



60 


Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time, the social stronghold 
of the French working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers and the Rurals to 
restore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the empire. Paris 
could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it 
by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be 
transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression 
of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people. 

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the 
various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members 
were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The 
Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same 
time. 

Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped 
of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the 
Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of 
the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman ?s wage. The vested 
interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with 
the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of 
the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto 
exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune. 

Flaving once got rid of the standing army and the police - the physical force elements of the old 
government - the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the ?parson- 
power,? by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The 
priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in 
imitation of their predecessors, the apostles. 

The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same 
time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible 
to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had 
imposed upon it. 

The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to 
mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, 
and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were 
to be elective, responsible, and revocable. 

The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of 
France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old 
centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of 
the producers. 

In a rough sketch of national organisation, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states 
clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and 
that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an 
extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their 
common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies 
were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time 
revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few 
but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be 
suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and 
thereafter responsible agents. 

The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal 
Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be 



61 


Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was 
but a parasitic excrescence. 

While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its 
legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society 
itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six 
years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal 
suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every 
other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known 
that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right 
man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other 
hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal 
suffrage by hierarchical investiture. 12 

It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts 
of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, 
this new Commune, which breaks with the modem state power, has been mistaken for a 
reproduction of the medieval Communes, which first preceded, and afterward became the 
substratum of, that very state power. The Communal Constitution has been mistaken for an 
attempt to break up into the federation of small states, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the 
Girondins 13 , that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has 
now become a powerful coefficient of social production. The antagonism of the Commune 
against the state power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against 
over-centralization. Peculiar historical circumstances may have prevented the classical 
development, as in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may have allowed, as in 
England, to complete the great central state organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors, and 
ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary magistrates in the counties. 

The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto 
absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this 
one act, it would have initiated the regeneration of France. 

The provincial French bourgeois saw in the Commune an attempt to restore the sway their order 
had held over the country under Louis Philippe, and which, under Louis Napoleon, was 
supplanted by the pretended rule of the country over the towns. In reality, the Communal 
Constitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their 
districts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests. The 
very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no 
longer as a check upon the now superseded state power. It could only enter into the head of a 
Bismarck - who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume his 
old trade, so befitting his mental calibre, of contributor to Kladderadatsch (the Berlin Punch 14 ) - 
it could only enter into such a head to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after the 
caricature of the old French municipal organization of 1791, the Prussian municipal constitution 
which degrades the town governments to mere secondary wheels in the police machinery of the 
Prussian state. The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions - cheap government 
- a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure: the standing army and state 
ftmctionarism. Its very existence presupposed the non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at 
least, is the normal encumbrance and indispensable cloak of class rule. It supplied the republic 
with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the ?true 
republic? was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants. 

The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity 
of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political 
form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret 
was this: It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the 



62 


Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to 
work out the economical emancipation of labor. 

Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a 
delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the peipetuation of his social 
slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation 
upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor emancipated, 
every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute. 

It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, 
about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their 
own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of 
present society with its two poles of capital and wage-slavery (the landlord now is but the 
sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin 
innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its 
prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the 
basis of all civilization! 

Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of 
the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to 
make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now 
chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated 
labor. But this is communism, ?impossible? communism! Why, those member of the ruling 
classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system 
- and they are many - have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative 
production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the 
capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon 
common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy 
and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production - what else, gentlemen, 
would it be but communism, ?possible? communism? 

The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias 
to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, 
and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own 
economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic 
processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the 
elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the 
full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working 
class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen?s gentlemen with pen and 
inkhom, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their 
ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility. 

When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain 
working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their ?natural 
superiors,? and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed it at salaries the highest 
of which barely amounted to one-fifth what, according to high scientific authority , is the 
minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school-board - the old world writhed 
in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labor, floating 
over the Hotel de Ville. 

And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the 
only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris bourgeois - 
shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants - the wealthy capitalist alone excepted. The Commune had 


Professor Huxley. [Note to the German addition of 1871.] 



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Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever recurring cause of dispute among the bourgeois 
themselves - the debtor and creditor accounts. 15 The same portion of the bourgeois, after they had 
assisted in putting down the working men?s insurrection of June 1848, had been at once 
unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors 16 by the then Constituent Assembly. But this was 
not their only motive for now rallying around the working class. They felt there was but one 
alternative - the Commune, or the empire - under whatever name it might reappear. The empire 
had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial 
swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, 
and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had 
shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the 
education of their children to the freres Ignorantins , 17 it had revolted their national feeling as 
Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins 
it made - the disappearance of the empire. In fact, after the exodus from Paris of the high 
Bonapartist and capitalist boheme, the true bourgeois Party of Order came out in the shape of the 
?Union Republicaine,? 18 enrolling themselves under the colors of the Commune and defending it 
against the wilful misconstructions of Thiers. Whether the gratitude of this great body of the 
bourgeois will stand the present severe trial, time must show. 

The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that ?its victory was their only hope.? Of 
all the lies hatched at Versailles and re-echoed by the glorious European penny-a-liner, one of the 
most tremendous was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. Think only of the love of 
the French peasant for the men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard indemnity. 19 In the 
eyes of the French peasant, the very existence of a great landed proprietor is in itself an 
encroachment on his conquests of 1789. The bourgeois, in 1848, had burdened his plot of land 
with the additional tax of 45 cents, in the franc; but then he did so in the name of the revolution; 
while now he had fomented a civil war against revolution, to shift on to the peasant?s shoulders 
the chief load of the 5 milliards of indemnity to be paid to the Prussian. The Commune, on the 
other hand, in one of its first proclamations, declared that the true originators of the war would be 
made to pay its cost. The Commune would have delivered the peasant of the blood tax - would 
have given him a cheap government - transformed his present blood-suckers, the notary, 
advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and 
responsible to, himself. It would have freed him of the tyranny of the garde champetre, the 
gendarme, and the prefect; would have put enlightenment by the schoolmaster in the place of 
stultification by the priest. And the French peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He would 
find it extremely reasonable that the pay of the priest, instead of being extorted by the tax- 
gatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the parishioners? religious instinct. 
Such were the great immediate boons which the rule of the Commune - and that rule alone - held 
out to the French peasantry. It is, therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate upon the more 
complicated but vital problems which the Commune alone was able, and at the same time 
compelled, to solve in favor of the peasant - viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubus 
upon his parcel of soil, the proletariat fancier (the rural proletariat), daily growing upon it, and 
his expropriation from it enforced, at a more and more rapid rate, by the very development of 
modem agriculture and the competition of capitalist farming. 

The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte president of the republic; but the Party of Order 
created the empire. What the French peasant really wants he commenced to show in 1 849 and 
1850, by opposing his maire to the government?s prefect, his school-master to the government?s 
priest, and himself to the government?s gendarme. All the laws made by the Party of Order in 
January and February 1850 were avowed measures of repression against the peasant. The peasant 
was a Bonapartist, because the Great Revolution, with all its benefits to him, was, in his eyes, 
personified in Napoleon. This delusion, rapidly breaking down under the Second Empire (and in 



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Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


its very nature hostile to the Rurals), this prejudice of the past, how could it have withstood the 
appeal of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the peasantry? 

The Rurals - this was, in fact, their chief apprehension - knew that three months? free 
communication of Communal Paris with the provinces would bring about a general rising of the 
peasants, and hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the 
spread of the rindeipest [cattle pest - contagious disease]. 

If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, 
and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men?s 
government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. 
Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the 
Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world. 

The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism, the rakes of all countries 
rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at this 
moment, the right hand of Thiers is Ganessco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is 
Markovsky, the Russian spy. The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for an 
immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by their 
conspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism 
by organizing police hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working 
man [Leo Frankel] its Minister of Labor. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had 
continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to, 
and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honoured the heroic sons of Poland [J. 
Dabrowski and W. Wroblewski] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris. And, to 
broadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the 
conquering Prussians on one side, and the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals, on the 
other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendome Column. 20 

The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures 
could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people. Such were the 
abolition of the nightwork of journeymen bakers; the prohibition, under penalty, of the 
employers? practice to reduce wages by levying upon their workpeople fines under manifold 
pretexts - a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator, 
judge, and executor, and filches the money to boot. Another measure of this class was the 
surrender to associations of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshops 
and factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or preferred to strike 
work. 

The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable for their sagacity and moderation, could 
only be such as were compatible with the state of a besieged town. Considering the colossal 
robberies committed upon the city of Paris by the great financial companies and contractors, 
under the protection of Haussman, 21 the Commune would have had an incomparably better title to 
confiscate their property than Louis Napoleon had against the Orleans family. The Hohenzollem 
and the English oligarchs, who both have derived a good deal of their estates from church 
plunders, were, of course, greatly shocked at the Commune clearing but 8,000f out of 
secularization. 

While the Versailles government, as soon as it had recovered some spirit and strength, used the 
most violent means against the Commune; while it put down the free expression of opinion all 
over France, even to the forbidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns; while it 
subjected Versailles and the rest of France to an espionage far surpassing that of the Second 
Empire; while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers printed at Paris, and sifted all 
correspondence from and to Paris; while in the National Assembly the most timid attempts to put 
in a word for Paris were howled down in a manner u nk nown even to the Chambre introuvable of 



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Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


1816; with the savage warfare of Versailles outside, and its attempts at corruption and conspiracy 
inside Paris - would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by affecting to keep all 
the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace? Had the government 
of the Commune been akin to that of M. Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to 
suppress Party of Order papers at Paris that there was to suppress Communal papers at Versailles. 

It was irritating indeed to the Rurals that at the very same time they declared the return to the 
church to be the only means of salvation for France, the infidel Commune unearthed the peculiar 
mysteries of the Picpus nunnery 22 , and of the Church of St. Laurent. It was a satire upon M. 
Thiers that, while he showered grand crosses upon the Bonapartist generals in acknowledgment 
of their mastery in losing battles, singing capitulations, and turning cigarettes at Wilhelmshohe, 23 
the Commune dismissed and arrested its generals whenever they were suspected of neglecting 
their duties. The expulsion from, and arrest by, the Commune of one of its members [Blanchet] 
who had slipped in under a false name, and had undergone at Lyons six days? imprisonment for 
simple bankruptcy, was it not a deliberate insult hurled at the forger, Jules Favre, then still the 
foreign minister of France, still selling France to Bismarck, and still dictating his orders to that 
paragon government of Belgium? But indeed the Commune did not pretend to infallibility, the 
invariable attribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published its doings and sayings, it 
initiated the public into all its shortcomings. 

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of different stamp; some of 
them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, 
but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of 
tradition; others mere brawlers who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of 
stereotyped declarations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of 
revolutionists of the first water. After March 18, some such men did also turn up, and in some 
cases contrived to play pre-eminent parts. As far as their power went, they hampered the real 
action of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of 
every previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off; but time 
was not allowed to the Commune. 

Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No longer any trace of 
the tawdry Paris of the Second Empire! No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, 
Irish absentees, 24 American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, and 
Wallachian boyards. No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any 
robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, 
and that without any police of any kind. 

?We,? said a member of the Commune, ?hear no longer of assassination, theft, and personal 
assault; it seems indeed as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservative 
friends.? 

The cocottes had refound the scent of their protectors - the absconding men of family, religion, 
and, above all, of property. In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface - 
heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking fighting, bleeding 
Paris - almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the Cannibals at its gates - radiant 
in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative! 

Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old world at Versailles - that assembly of the 
ghouls of all defunct regimes, Legitimists and Orleanists, eager to feed upon the carcass of the 
nation - with a tail of antediluvian republicans, sanctioning, by their presence in the Assembly, 
the slaveholders? rebellion, relying for the maintenance of their parliamentary republic upon the 
vanity of the senile mountebank at its head, and caricaturing 1789 by holding their ghastly 



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Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


meetings in the Jeu de Paume. 1 * There it was, this Assembly, the representative of everything dead 
in France, propped up to the semblance of life by nothing but the swords of the generals of Louis 
Bonaparte. Paris all truth, Versailles all lie; and that lie vented through the mouth of Thiers. 

Thiers tells a deputation of the mayors of the Seine-et-Oise - ?You may rely upon my word, 
which I have never broken!? 

He tells the Assembly itself that ?it was the most freely elected and most liberal Assembly France 
ever possessed?; he tells his motley soldiery that it was ?the admiration of the world, and the 
finest army France ever possessed?; he tells the provinces that the bombardment of Paris by him 
was a myth: ?If some cannon-shots have been fired, it was not the deed of the army of Versailles, 
but of some insurgents trying to make believe that they are fighting, while they dare not show 
their faces.? He again tells the provinces that ?the artillery of Versailles does not bombard Paris, 
but only cannonades it.? He tells the Archbishop of Paris that the pretended executions and 
reprisals (!) attributed to the Versailles troops were all moonshine. He tells Paris that he was only 
anxious ?to free it from the hideous tyrants who oppress it,? and that, in fact, the Paris of the 
Commune was ?but a handful of criminals.? 

The Paris of M. Thiers was not the real Paris of the ?vile multitude,? but a phantom Paris, the 
Paris of the francs-fileurs , 25 the Paris of the Boulevards, male and female - the rich, the capitalist, 
the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary bohome, and its 
cocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, and Saint-Germain; considering the civil war but an 
agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through telescopes, counting the rounds of 
cannon, swearing by their own honour and that of their prostitutes, that the performance was far 
better got up than it used to be at the Porte St. Martin. The men who fell were really dead; the 
cries of the wounded were cries in good earnest; and, besides, the whole thing was so intensely 
historical. 

This is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the emigration of Coblenz was the France of M. de Calonne . 26 


1 The tennis court where the National Assembly of 1789 adopted its famous decisions. [Note to the German addition of 

1871.] 



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Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


Endnotes 


1 The first Russian translation of the Manifesto of the Communist Party was made by Bakunin, who 
despite being one of Marx and Engels? most pronounced opponents in the working class movement, 
saw the great revolutionary importance contained within the Manifesto. Published in Geneva in 1869 
(printing it in Russia was impossible due to state censorship), Bakunin? s translation was not 
completely accurate, and was replaced a decade later by Plekhanov?s translation in 1882, for which 
both Marx and Engels wrote a preface. 

2 

A reference to the events that occurred in Russia after the assassination, on March, 1, 1881, of 
Emperor Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya members. Alexander III, his successor, was staying in 
Gatchina for fear of further terrorism. 

3 This preface was written by Engels on May 1, 1890, when, in accordance with the decision of the 
Paris Congress of the Second International (July 1889), mass demonstrations, strikes and meetings 
were held in numerous European and American countries. The workers put forward the demand for an 
8 hour working day and other demands set forth by the Congress. From that day forward workers all 
over the world celebrate the first of May as a day of international proletarian solidarity. 

4 A reference to the movement for an electoral reform which, under the pressure of the working class, 
was passed by the British House of Commons in 1831 and finally endorsed by the House of Lords in 
June, 1832. The reform was directed against monopoly rule of the landed and finance aristocracy and 
opened the way to Parliament for the representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. Neither workers nor 
the petty-bourgeois were allowed electoral rights, despite assurances they would. 

5 The famous final phrase of the Manifesto, ?Working Men of All Countries, Unite!?, in the original 
Gennan is: ? Proletarier alien Lander, vereinigt euch!? Thus, a more correct translation would be 
?Proletarians of all countries, Unite!? 

?Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!? is a popularisation of the 
last three sentences, and is not found in any official translation. Since this English translation was 
approved by Engels, we have kept the original intact. 

(1 In their works written in later periods, Marx and Engels substituted the more accurate concepts of 
?sale of labour power?, ?value of labour power? and ?price of labour power? (first introduced by 
Marx) for ?sale of labour?, ?value of labour? and ?price of labour?, as used here. 

7 Engels left half a page blank here in the manuscript. The ?Draft of the Communist Confession of 
Faith,? has the answer shown for the same question (Number 12). 

8 i i 

Engels? put ?unchanged? here, referring to the answer in the June draft under No. 21 as shown. 

9 Similarly, this refers to the answer to Question 23 in the June draft. 

10 The Chartists were the participants in the political movement of the British workers which lasted 
from the 1830s to the middle 1850s and had as its slogan the adoption of a People?s Charter, 
demanding universal franchise and a series of conditions guaranteeing voting rights for all workers. 
Lenin defined Chartism as the world?s ?first broad, truly mass and politically organized proletarian 
revolutionary movement? (Collected Works, Eng. ed., Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Vol. 29, p. 
309.) The decline of the Chartist movement was due to the strengthening of Britain?s industrial and 
commercial monopoly and the bribing of the upper stratum of the working class (?the labour 
aristocracy?) by the British bourgeoisie out of its super-profits. Both factors led to the strengthening of 
opportunist tendencies in this stratum as expressed, in particular, by the refusal of the trade union 
leaders to support Chartism. 

11 Probably a references to the National Reform Association, founded during the 1840s by George H. 
Evans, with headquarters in New York City, which had for its motto, ?Vote Yourself a Farm?. 



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Third Address to the International Working Men?s Association, May 1871 


12 

A top-down system of appointing officials in bourgeois systems, where high-up officials appoint 
many or all lower officials. 

13 

Girondins - The party of the influential bourgeoisie during the French revolution at the end of the 
18th century. (The name is derived from the Department of Gironde.) It came out against the Jacobin 
government and the revolutionary masses which supported it, under the banner of defending the 
departments? right to autonomy and federation. 

14 The party of the influential bourgeoisie during the French revolution at the end of the 18th century. 
(The name is derived from the Department of Gironde.) It came out against the Jacobin government 
and the revolutionary masses which supported it, under the banner of defending the departments? right 
to autonomy and federation. 

15 A reference to the Paris Commune?s decree of April 16, 1871, providing for payment of all debts in 
instalments over three years and abolition of interest on them. 

16 On Aug. 22, 1848, the Constituent Assembly rejected the bill on ?amiable agreements? ( concordats 
a I ?amiable) aimed to introduce the deferred payment of debts. As a result of this measure, a 
considerable section of the petty-bourgeoisie were utterly ruined and found themselves completely 
dependent on the creditors of the richest bourgeoisie. 

17 Freres Ignorantins - Ignorant Brothers, a nickname for a religious order, founded in Rheims in 
1680, whose members pledged themselves to educate children of the poor. The pupils received a 

predominantly religious education and barely any knowledge otherwise. 

1 8 

Alliance republicaine des Departements - a political association of petty-bourgeois representatives 
from the various departments of France, who lived in Paris; calling on the people to fight against the 
Versailles government and the monarchist National Assembly and to support the Commune 
throughout the country. 

19 The law of April 27, 1825 on the payment of compensation to the former emigres for the landed 
states confiscated from them during the preceding French Revolution. 

20 

The Vendome Column was erected between 1806 and 1810 in Paris in honour of the victories of 
Napoleonic France; it was made out of the bronze captured from enemy guns and was crowned by a 
statue of Napoleon. On May 16, 1871, by order of the Paris Commune, the Vendome Column was 
pulled down. 

21 During the Second Empire, Baron Haussmann was Prefect of the Department of the Seine (the City 
of Paris). He introduced a number of changes in the layout of the city for the purpose of crushing 
workers? revolts. 

22 In the Picpus nunnery cases of the nuns being incarcerated in cells for many years were exposed and 
instruments of torture were found; in the church of St. Laurent a secret cemetery was found attesting 
to the murders that had been committed there. These facts were exposed by the Commune?s 
newspaper Mot d ?Ordre on May 5, 1871, and in a pamphlet Les Crimes des congregations religieuses. 

23 

The chief occupation of the French prisoners of war in Wilhelmshohe (those captured after the 
Battle of Sedan) was making cigars for their own use. 

Rich landowners who hardly ever visited their estates, but instead had their land managed by agents 
or leased it to petty-bourgeois who, in their turn, sub-leased the land at high rents. 

25 Francs-flleurs - literally rendered: ?free absconder,? the nickname given to the Paris bourgeois who 
fled from the city during the siege. The name carried brazen historical irony as a result of its 
resemblance to the word ? francs-tireurs ? (?free sharpshooters?) - French guerrillas who actively 
fought against the Prussians. 

26 A city in Germany; during the French Revolution at the end of the 18th-century it was the centre 
where the landlord monarchist emigres made preparations for intervention against revolutionary 
France. Coblenz was the seat of the emigre government headed by the rabid reactionary de Calonne, a 
former minister of Louis XVI. 
