Manifesto of the Communist Party

43 

Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 

displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expenses 

and permitted an elaborate division of labor.  

This is how it has come about that in civilized countries at the present time nearly all kinds of 

labor are performed in factories – and, in nearly all branches of work, handicrafts and 

manufacture have been superseded. This process has, to an ever greater degree, ruined the old 

middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the 

workers; and two new classes have been created which are gradually swallowing up all the others. 

These are:  

(i) The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost 

exclusive possession of all the means of subsistence and of the instruments 

(machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of 

subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.  

(ii) The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the 

bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their 

support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.  

– 5 –  

Under what conditions does this sale of the 

labor of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place? 

Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same 

laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we 

shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always 

equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of 

labor.  

But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence 

necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying 

out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the 

price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the 

maintenance of life.  

However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker 

sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the 

industrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities 

than what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than his 

minimum.  

This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big 

industry has taken possession of all branches of production.  

– 6 –  

What working classes were there before the industrial 

revolution? 

The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, 

lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes.  

In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward 

countries and even in the southern part of the United States.  

In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, 

Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there 

were also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. 

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44 

Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 

Gradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers who 

were even then employed by larger capitalists.  

– 7 –  

In what way do proletarians differ from slaves? 

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.  

The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may 

be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire 

bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. 

This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.  

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.  

The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better 

existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social 

development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.  

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.  

– 8 –  

In what way do proletarians differ from serfs? 

The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which 

he gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor.  

The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, 

in exchange for a part of the product.  

The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has 

not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it.  

The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes 

a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby 

becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In 

short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The 

proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.  

– 9 –  

In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen? 

In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywhere 

in the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at most 

temporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can 

often achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not 

yet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition 

But as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishes 

fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a 

proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or entering 

the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now more 

often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., the 

more or less communist movement.

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