Manifesto of the Communist Party

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Manifesto of the Communist Party 

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 

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Manifesto of the Communist Party 

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 

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