Communist Manifest of Marx and Engels new edition in which the word Bourgeois is substituted with word Communist Party. For this edition, 45 years ago, the author, his family, friends, and parents were killed or made disappeared.
Communist Party as Bourgeoisie
I. COMMUNIST PARTY AND PROLETARIANS The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master 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 re-constitution 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 rank. 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. The modern Communist Party 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 Communist Party, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the 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: Communist Party 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 Communist Party were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising Communist Party. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization 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, under 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 corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture 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 whole industrial armies, the modern Communist Party. 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 time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the Communist Party developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern Communist Party 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 Communist Party 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 mediaeval 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 manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, the corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the Communist Party has at last, since the establishment of Modern 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 Communist Party. The Communist Party, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The Communist Party, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical Communist party calculation. It has resolved personal worth into obedience and, in taking away the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Serve the Communist Party Elite Interests. In a word, for exploitation, veiled by doctrinal and ideological illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The Communists have 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, and the man of science, into low paid slaves. Communism has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and has reduced the family relation to mere surveillance. Communism has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists 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 Export of Social Revolution that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. Communism cannot exist without constantly stealing technologies, and thereby the relations of production, and with them, the whole relations of society depends of what will steal from capitalist countries. Sometimes the conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, coexists with advanced technologies because of lack of production logic. Constant indoctrination of production, uninterrupted communist ideology imposition of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the Communist 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. Communism needs constant surveillance and repression of its citizens all over the whole surface of the globe. It must control them everywhere, settle everywhere, establish control over them everywhere. The communists, through the exploitation of their people and the distortion of economic facts about social achievements, decreased and rationed consumption to show false economic growth and prosperity. To the greatest chagrin of people in a communist society are driven by the dictature of a Politburo and Communist party committee. They establish their power through repression and militarization of almost everything. All relations outside of the communist block are on the basis of suspicion and threat with nuclear armament and a militarized population. War threat to the Western countries becomes a life and death question for all communism. All natural resources are used and the entire population works up to the world dominance of communism. People are incarcerated to produce the raw materials and the fruit of their labor is taken by the state for war preparation. There are no consumer needs and no consumer rights, satisfied by the labor in the communist industry. The government limits the wants, and the workers are not motivated. The productivity and quality are low of the products. At the same moment, the communist elite satisfies its self-sufficiency by secretly buying products from capitalist countries. Same in material, and also in intellectual meaning. The
intellectual creations of individuals who are living in a communist country become communist state property. Technology is old and labor-taking. Communist bureaucracy and mediocrity are in the base of ruling in any field of society. The communists by the slow or no improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely controlled communication, draws all, even the most advanced, nations into barbarism. The cheap and low-quality of its commodities break all human aspirations, which forces the people to intensely obstinate hatred of western people for their way of living. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the communist mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls progressive society into their midst, i.e ., to become communists themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own communist image. The communists subjected the country to the rule of the towns. People are not permitted to dislocate from one town to another. It has created closed cities ruled and controlled by local communist party structures. It intentionally has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural and avoids that part of the population to benefit directly from agricultural production. In communism, all lands are state- owned. Just as it has made the country administratively dependent on the communist bureaucracy of the towns. People from the country move to the towns so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian parts dependent on the communist administration. Entire nations of peasants became nations of communists, the West on the East. The communist totalitarian state keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production and has concentrated property in the communist state's hands. The necessary consequence of this was political and economic centralization. Independent or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one totalitarian nation, with one totalitarian government, one code of laws, one national party interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff. The communists, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, have created a more massive and more colossal productive mess than have all preceding generations together. The 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, canalization 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 labor? We see then: that the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the communists built themselves 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 pre-communist society produced and exchanged, the capitalist organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in a word, the capitalist relations of property
became no longer compatible with the deteriorated productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped the planned communist form of production, accompanied by a social and communist constitution adapted to it and by the economical and political sway of the communist elite class. A similar movement went on before our own eyes. A post-modern communists society with its relations of production, exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such a gigantic decrease in production and exchange, is like one sorcerer, who controls the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his communists spells. For many three decades past, the history of communist industry and commerce is but the history of the end of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the communists and of its rule. It is enough to mention the economic crises that by their periodical return put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire communist society. In these crises, a significant part of the population not only does not have access to its labor products but also has to pay tribute to the party's mistakes with “voluntary” work. During these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of bad management of the communist economy. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism (serf peasants); it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce produce nothing, and stores are empty; and why? Because there is too much communism, too little understanding of how the economy works, too little freedom of initiative, and too much totalitarian state. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of communist property; on the contrary, communists 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 society, endanger the existence of society. The conditions of communist society are too narrow to create social wealth and prosperity. And how does communism get over these crises? On the one hand, enforced free of pay labor one day every week; on the other, the decreased wages and the more thorough incarceration of people and their exploitation. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive economic crises and by diminishing the means, there are crises in communism. The weapons with which communism felled capitalism to the ground are now turned against communism itself. But not only have communists forged the weapons that bring death to themselves; but they have also called the anger and life no-satisfaction of the men who will become those weapons—the communist working class—the proletarians. In absurd proportion of communist ideology, i.e ., “From each according to possibilities, to each according to needs.“, in the same proportion as in capitalism the
proletariat, the working class, developed—a class of laborers, 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 piece-meal, 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 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 his 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 increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc. Modern 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 Communist Party class, and of the Communist Party State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual Communist Party 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 modern 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 Communist Party, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc. The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, 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 Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the 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 Communist Party. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual Communist Party who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the Communist Party 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. 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 Communist Party, 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 Communist Party, the petty Communist Party. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the Communist Party; every victory so obtained is a victory for the Communist Party. 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 Communist Party, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual Communist Party take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the Communist Party; 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 modern 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 modern proletarians, 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 Communist Party 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 Communist Party finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the Communist Party itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the Communist Party of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The Communist Party itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the Communist Party. Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes 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 process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of 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 Communist Party, so now a portion of the Communist Party goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the Communist Party 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 Communist Party today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the Communist Party, 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 so only 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,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of 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 conditions 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 Communist Party family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern 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 Communist Party prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many Communist Party 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 interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests 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 Communist Party is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own Communist Party. 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 Communist Party 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 Communist Party, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a Communist Party. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress 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 Communist Party is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its
conditions of existence upon society as 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 Communist Party, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the Communist Party class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage- labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the Communist Party, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the Communist Party produces and appropriates products. What the Communist Party, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. ..
During the last 170 years, for every letter of this text, Marxists- Communists Parties in the world, killed 4500 people.
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