A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of ' Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, 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 the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its re¬ actionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in 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 Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.
To this end the Communists of various nationali¬ ties have assembled in London, and sketched the fol¬ lowing manifesto to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish lan¬ guages.
I.
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS, (a)
The history of all hitherto existing society (b) is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster (c) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition
(a) By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wagelabor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live.
(b) That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foun¬ dation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or to have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organi¬ zation of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primaeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in: “Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats,” 2nd edit., Stuttgart 1886.
(c) Guildmaster, that is a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hid¬ den, now open fight, that each time ended, either in 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.
A
i
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the 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: Bour¬ geoisie 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 bour¬ geoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the 16
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, callous “cash pay¬ ment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philis¬ tine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical cal¬ culation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, un¬ conscionable 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 honored 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 laborers.
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 vigor in the middle ages, which Reactionists 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.
