The Communist Manifesto¶
Core Argument¶
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels present a sweeping historical materialist analysis, arguing that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Modern bourgeois society, they contend, has simplified these antagonisms into two great, directly hostile camps: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie itself is a product of a long series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange, from feudal guilds through manufacture to modern industry and the world market. It has played a historically revolutionary part, tearing asunder feudal ties, substituting naked exploitation for religious and political illusions, and constantly revolutionising the instruments of production. It creates a world after its own image, drawing all nations into civilisation through cheap commodities, and centralising population, means of production, and property. However, the productive forces it conjures up periodically revolt against bourgeois property relations, producing commercial crises of overproduction. The bourgeoisie thus forges its own death weapons and calls into existence its own gravediggers: the proletariat.
The proletariat, a class of labourers who live only so long as they find work, are reduced to appendages of the machine, their wages driven down. They develop from scattered individuals fighting the instruments of production, through trade unions, into a national class organised as a political party, their union accelerated by modern means of communication. The bourgeoisie’s constant battles—with the aristocracy, rival bourgeois factions, and foreign bourgeoisies—force it to appeal to the proletariat for help, thereby dragging the proletariat into the political arena and supplying it with weapons of political and general education. At decisive moments, a small section of the ruling class, particularly bourgeois ideologists who comprehend the historical movement theoretically, goes over to the proletariat. The proletariat alone is a truly revolutionary class, the essential product of modern industry. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in its interest. The bourgeoisie is unfit to rule because it cannot assure its slave’s existence; society can no longer live under it. The development of modern industry replaces competition among labourers with revolutionary combination, cutting the foundation from under the bourgeoisie. Its fall and proletarian victory are inevitable.
Communists are the most advanced, resolute section of working-class parties, representing the movement’s overall interests; their theory is summed up as abolition of bourgeois private property. Capital is a social power; converting it to common property changes its class character, not personal property. Bourgeois ideas of freedom, culture, law, and family are outgrowths of bourgeois production; the ruling ideas of each age are the ideas of its ruling class. The communist revolution involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. The first step is to raise the proletariat to the ruling class and win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will then use political supremacy to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state and increase productive forces as rapidly as possible, through measures including abolition of property in land, a heavy progressive income tax, centralisation of credit and transport, and free public education. Once class distinctions disappear, public power loses its political character. In place of bourgeois society stands an association where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
The Manifesto also delivers a sharp polemic against critical-utopian socialism, which it defines by its belief that it stands above class antagonisms, appealing to all of society, especially the ruling class, and rejecting political and revolutionary action in favour of peaceful, exemplary means. Their proposals—abolition of town/country distinctions, the family, private industry, and the wage system—are purely utopian, corresponding to the proletariat’s undeveloped state. Their originators were revolutionary, but their disciples become reactionary sects that deaden class struggle and oppose working-class political action. The Communists, by contrast, fight for the proletariat’s immediate interests while representing its future. They ally with other opposition parties tactically but never cease instilling recognition of bourgeois-proletarian antagonism. Germany is prioritised because its impending bourgeois revolution, under advanced conditions, will be the prelude to a proletarian revolution. Communists openly declare that their ends require the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.