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

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 monopolized by
closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the
growing wants of the new markets. The
manufacturing system took its place. The
guild-masters were pushed aside by the
manufacturing middle class; division of
labor between the different corporate guilds
vanished in the face of division of labor in
each single workshop.

Meantime, the markets kept ever growing,
the demand ever rising. Even
manufacturers no longer sufficed.

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
torn asunder the motley feudal ties that
bound man to his "natural superiors", and
has left no other nexus between people than
naked self-interest, than callous "cash
payment". It has drowned out the most
heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of
chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of
egotistical calculation. It has resolved
personal worth into exchange value, and in
place of the numberless indefeasible
chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom Free Trade. In 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 honored 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 laborers.

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

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came
to pass that the brutal display of vigor 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.

death question for all civilized 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 civilization. The
cheap prices of commodities are the heavy
artillery 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 civilization into their midst, i.e.,
to become bourgeois themselves. In one
word, it creates a world after its own image.

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

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 modern productive forces
against modern 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
civilization, 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

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 labor, is equal to its cost of
production. In proportion, therefore, as the
repulsiveness of the work increases, the
wage decreases. What is more, in
proportion as the use of machinery and
division of labor 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.

Modern Industry has converted the little
workshop of the patriarchal master into the
great factory of the industrial capitalist.
Masses of laborers, crowded into the
factory, are organized 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, in 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 labor, in other words, the
more modern industry becomes developed,
the more is the labor 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
labor, more or less expensive to use,
according to their age and sex.

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 equalized, in proportion as
machinery obliterates all distinctions of
labor, 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 (trade 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 lie 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

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 ruling class,
in fact within the whole range of old society,
assumes such a violent, glaring character,
that a small section of the ruling class cuts
itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary
class, the class that holds the future in its
hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier
period, a section of the nobility went over to
the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the
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 genuinely revolutionary class. The
other classes decay and finally disappear in
the face of Modern 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.

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
modern laborer, 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 an
overriding 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.

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 primeaval communities, society begins
to be differentiated into separate and finally
antagonistic classes. I have attempted to
retrace this dissolution in _Der Ursprung der

Familie, des Privateigenthumus und des
Staats_, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886.
[Engels, 1888 English edition]

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

[4] 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]

Chapter II PROLETARIANS AND
COMMUNISTS

In what relation do the Communists stand to
the proletarians as a whole? The
Communists do not form a separate party
opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart
from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles

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 favor 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 labor, 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 modern bourgeois
private property?

want to do away with is the miserable
character of this appropriation, under which
the laborer 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 labor is but a
means to increase accumulated labor. In
communist society, accumulated labor is
but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote
the existence of the laborer.

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 communist abolition of
buying and selling, or 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

labor 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,
etc. 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 stringing 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 of the family! Even the most
radical flare up at this infamous proposal of

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 free
love; 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. (Ah, those
were the days!)

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 legalized system of
free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that
the abolition of the present system of
production must bring with it the abolition of
free love springing from that system, i.e., of
prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached
with desiring to abolish countries and
nationality.

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
revolutionize 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 eighteenth century to
rationalist ideas, feudal 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 juridicial 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,

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. Centralization of credit in the banks of the
state, by means of a national bank with
state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization 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 obligation 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 populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public
schools. Abolition of children's factory labor
in its present form. Combination of
education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy
was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its
own interests, and to formulate its
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 modern 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
"Young 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 modern
proletariat never existed, they forget that the
modern 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.

petty bourgeois has been formed,
fluctuating between proletariat and
bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself a
supplementary part of bourgeois society.
The individual members of this class,
however, as being constantly hurled down
into the proletariat by the action of
competition, and, as Modern Industry
develops, they even see the moment
approaching when they will completely
disappear as an independent section of
modern 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 modern production. It laid bare
the hypocritical apologies of economists. It
proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous
effects of machinery and division of labor;
the concentration of capital and land in a
few hands; overproduction and crises; it
pointed out the inevitable ruin 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.

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 category 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

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.

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 recognized, 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"

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 labor, but,
at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the
administrative work of bourgeois
government.

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 modern revolution, has
always given voice to the demands of the
proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf

conditions of emancipation to fantastic
ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class
organization of the proletariat to an
organization 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 favored. 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.

But these socialist and communist

compelled to appeal to the feelings and
purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they
sink into the category of the reactionary
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.

FOOTNOTES

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

[2] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition:
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.

[3] NOTE by Engels to 1888 German edition:
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.

[4] Francois Noel Babeuf (1760-1797): French

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
Krakow in 1846.

In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie
whenever it acts in a revolutionary way,
against the absolute monarchy, the feudal
squirearchy, and the petty-bourgeoisie.

But they never cease, for a single instant, to
instill 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

PREFACE TO 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 Revolution. 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. 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

PREFACE TO 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. 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. Bother 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

PREFACE TO 1883 GERMAN EDITION

The preface to the present edition I must,
alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the
whole working class class of Europe and
America owes more than to any one else
rests at Highgate Cemetary and over his
grave the first first grass is already growing.
Since his death [March 13, 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 soley
and exclusively to Marx.

[ENGELS FOOTNOTE TO PARAGRAPH:
"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

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 League, then located in
Cologne. The members were arrested and,
after eighteen months' imprisonment, they
were tried in October 1852. This selebrated
"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 League was formlly 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 Lassalleans in Germany.

[ENGEL'S FOOTNOTE: 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
worhsops supported by state credit.]

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 modern 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

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.

From our joint preface to the German
edition of 1872, I 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 Modern 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 Assocation_
1871, where this point is further developed.)

"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. 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

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 saigns 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, Hernan
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

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 modern 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,