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Core Argument

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

This article is Friedrich Engels' 1847 text The Principles of Communism — the first systematic Marxist FAQ, written as a draft programme for the Communist League. Its central thesis is that the proletariat is the product of the industrial revolution and the class which, by virtue of its structural position within capitalist production, is historically compelled to abolish private property and establish a classless society. The argument is not merely descriptive but programmatic: communism is not an arbitrary ideal but the necessary outcome of contradictions inherent in big industry itself. The periodic commercial crises every five to seven years demonstrate that the productive forces have outgrown the framework of private property and free competition, making a new social organisation based on common ownership and planned production both possible and unavoidable.

Theoretical Grounding

The text sits at the foundational moment of historical materialism, written a year before the Communist Manifesto and sharing its essential architecture. Engels grounds his analysis in several key Marxist concepts:

  • The class character of the proletariat: Defined not by poverty but by its structural relation to capital — the proletarian "lives entirely from the sale of its labour and does not draw profit from any kind of capital." This is a relational, not descriptive, definition.

  • The law of value applied to labour power: Labour is a commodity whose price tends toward its cost of production — the minimum means of subsistence. Engels presents this as an economic law that "operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big industry has taken possession of all branches of production."

  • The development of productive forces as the motor of history: Each stage of property relations corresponds to a given level of productive development. Private property was historically necessary and progressive; it has now become a fetter.

  • The theory of crisis: Periodic commercial crises are not accidents but necessary expressions of the contradiction between社会化 production and private appropriation. Big industry "has now outgrown free competition."

  • The international character of the revolution: Because big industry has created a world market and coordinated social development across countries, the communist revolution "must take place simultaneously in all civilised countries."

The text also contains an early formulation of the transition period — the democratic constitution as the political form through which the proletariat begins to expropriate the bourgeoisie, with a series of transitional measures (progressive taxation, state banks, national factories, communal education) that gradually concentrate all production in the hands of the state until private property "disappears of its own accord."

Conjunctural Relevance

The article is a primary source from 1847, not an analysis of the current conjuncture. Its relevance today is theoretical and programmatic. However, several features of the argument speak directly to contemporary conditions:

  • The persistence of crisis: Engels' description of crises every five to seven years, "always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by general revolutionary stirrings," finds echoes in the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 economic disruption, and the current inflationary pressures across the global economy. The pattern of overproduction followed by destruction of capital and renewed expansion remains intact, though the mechanisms have been modified by state intervention and fictitious capital.

  • The world market and global interdependence: Engels' observation that "a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year's time" anticipates the contemporary global supply chain, where technological change in the imperialist centres immediately impacts labour in the Global South. The integration of China into the world market since the 1980s has reproduced on a vaster scale the dynamics Engels describes.

  • The bourgeoisie as the first class in society: The description of how the bourgeoisie "annihilated the power of the aristocracy" through free competition and representative government remains the framework for understanding the political dominance of capital today, though the forms have evolved from constitutional monarchy to neoliberal parliamentary democracy.

  • The question of revolutionary strategy: Engels' discussion of the democratic socialists — those who favour socialist measures "not as part of the transition to communism" but as sufficient in themselves — speaks directly to contemporary reformist currents that seek to manage capitalism rather than abolish it.

Where the Argument Continues

This text is a preparatory document for the Communist Manifesto (1848), which Engels and Marx wrote the following year. The Manifesto expands the analysis into a full historical survey of the bourgeoisie and proletariat, develops the theory of the state, and provides a more detailed polemic against rival socialist currents.

Engels' later works develop themes introduced here:

  • The theory of crisis is elaborated in Anti-Dühring (1878) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), which provide a more systematic account of the contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation.

  • The transition period outlined in Question 18 anticipates the measures later discussed in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), which distinguishes between the lower and higher phases of communist society.

  • The question of the state — only briefly touched here through the "democratic constitution" — is developed in Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) and Marx's The Civil War in France (1871).

  • The international character of revolution is revisited in later debates within the Marxist tradition, particularly around the theory of permanent revolution (Trotsky) and socialism in one country (Stalin).

On In Defence of Marxism, the argument continues in articles analysing the contemporary relevance of the Communist Manifesto, the nature of economic crises under neoliberalism, and the strategic tasks of the revolutionary party in the 21st century.

Connections

  • Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848): The direct successor to this text, expanding the historical analysis and adding the famous ten-point programme.

  • Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880): A more mature and systematic presentation of the same materialist conception of history.

  • Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1849): Develops the analysis of the sale of labour power and the determination of wages introduced in Questions 5 and 11.

  • Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875): Distinguishes between the transitional period and the two phases of communist society, refining the schematic presentation in Questions 18 and 20.

  • Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917): Draws on Engels' formulations about the "withering away" of the state and the transition to communism.

  • Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (1930): Develops the internationalist perspective of Question 19 in the context of uneven development and the colonial world.

Key Quotes

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

  2. "The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour 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 labour – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition."

  3. "Though big industry in its earliest stage created free competition, it has now outgrown free competition; that, for big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter."

  4. "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."

  5. "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."

  6. "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."