Manifesto of the Communist Party

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Manifesto of the Communist Party 

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

*

: 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 

                                                      

*

 This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or 

conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition] “Commune” 

was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters 

local self-government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economical development of 

the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888 

English Edition]  

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Manifesto of the Communist Party 

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.  

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