Manifesto of the Communist Party

by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

February 1848
Written: Late 1847;
First Published: February 1848;
Source: Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One,
Copyleft: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1987, 2000, 2010. Permission is granted to
distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-
Alike License

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of

old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and
Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

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

Two things result from this fact:

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

power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world,
publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the
Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London

and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French,
German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians(1)

The history of all hitherto existing society (2) is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition
to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a
fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at
large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
 In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated
arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social 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 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 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
manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by
the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial
millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
 Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of
America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to
commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has,
in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry,
commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background
every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

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

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a

corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the
sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the
medieval commune(4): here independent urban republic (as in Italy and
Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France);
afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-
feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and,
in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at
last, since the establishment of 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 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 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
fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of
egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and
in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that
single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation,
veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless,
direct, brutal exploitation.
 The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured
and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer,
the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

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

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of
vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting
complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what
man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing
Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has
conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and
crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the

instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of
production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and
agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-
frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before
they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind.

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

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To
the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry
the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries
have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new
industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised
nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw
material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are
consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the
old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants,
requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place
of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse
in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so
also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness
become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local
literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,

by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the
most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are
the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it
forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It
compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of
production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their
midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world
after its own image.

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

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state
of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has
agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has
concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was
political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with
separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became
lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one
national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
 The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created
more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery,
application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation,
railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation,
canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what
earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces
slumbered in the lap of social labour?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose

foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At
a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of
exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and
exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry,
in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible
with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters.
They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and

political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the
bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois

society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society
that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is
like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of
industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of 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 civilisation, too much means of subsistence,
too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal
of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of
bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these
conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these
fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too
narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the
bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction
of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets,
and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving
the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the
means whereby crises are prevented.

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

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons
— the modern working class — the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same

proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of
labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so
long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves
piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are
consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the
fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the
work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all
charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is
only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that
is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted,
almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance,
and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and
therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion,
therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay
more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in
the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation
of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by
increased speed of machinery, etc.

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 bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois
State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker,
and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more
openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the
more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other
words, the more 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 bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

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

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth
begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by
individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the
operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who
directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois
conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves;
they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to
pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the
vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the
whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they
unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their
own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to
attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion,
and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the
proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the
remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois,
the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in
the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the
bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in
number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it
feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the
ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as
machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces
wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois,
and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more
fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly
developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions
between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more
the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin
to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club
together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent
associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional
revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of
their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of
the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication
that are created by 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 proletarian, thanks to
railways, achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a

political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between
the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It
compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking
advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill
in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many
ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself
involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those
portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to
the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In
all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for
help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself,
therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general
education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting
the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by
the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least
threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat
with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress
of dissolution going on within the 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 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 bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their
existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary,
but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the
wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view
of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their
present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place
themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively

rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and
there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions
of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already
virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife
and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family
relations; modern industry 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 bourgeois
prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their
already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of
appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive
forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of
appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.
They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy
all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the

interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the
immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society,
cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of
official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the
bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must,
of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat,

we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to
the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent
overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on
the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a
class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least,
continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself
to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of
the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern
labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks
deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He
becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population
and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any
longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence
upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent
to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help
letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by
him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its
existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois
class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is
wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the
labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the
revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern
Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the
bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie
therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory
of the proletariat are equally inevitable.