Manifesto of the Communist Party

17 

Manifesto of the Communist Party 

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.  

---

18 

Manifesto of the Communist Party 

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.  

---