SOMMUNISM

SOMMUNISM

Part Communism and Part Socialism

My Comrades, Today you shall join me in my new political philosophy Sommunism. Sommunism is half communism and half socialism. My fellow comrades join me today. LONG LIVE SOMMUNISM!

COMMUNIST MANIEFESTO

Communist Manifesto

CHAPTER I.BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS.*
*By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the
means of social production, and employers of wage labour; by proletariat
the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of
their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.
The history of all hitherto existing society* is the history of classstruggles.
*That is, all written history. In 1837, 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 foundation 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 organization 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 The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-masters*
and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an Uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes.*Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a
head of a guild.
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. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie,
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-
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 colonization 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 monopolized 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 aside 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
manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionized 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 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, it became an armed
and self-governing association in the mediaeval 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 manufacture
proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner stone 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.
*"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 economic development of the bourgeoisie, England is here
taken as the typical country; for its political development, France.
The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history. 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
no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
"cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious
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 migrations of nations and
crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing
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 revolutionizing 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 in 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 whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections 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
reactionaries 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
civilized 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 nations, even the most barbarian, into
civilization. The cheap prices of its 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 civilization into
their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a
world after its own image. 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 civilized ones, nations of
peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. More and more the
bourgeoisie keeps doing away with the scattered state of the population, of
the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population,
centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few
hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization.
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, canalization 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, that the means of production and of exchange which
served as the foundation for the growth of the bourgeoisie 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 organization of agriculture and
manufacturing industry, in a 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 to it, and by 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 bourgeoisie 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 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
civilization, 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 no sooner do they overcome these fetters than 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. 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
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 his 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 increase of the work exacted in a given time, or
by increased speed of the 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
organized 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 overseer, 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 develops- 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 has the
labourer received his wages in cash, for the moment escaping exploitation
by the manufacturer, 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 specialized 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 operatives 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 machinery to pieces, they set
factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the
workman of the Middle Ages. 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,
still able to do so for a time. 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 bourgeoisie. 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
equalized, 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 unceasing
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 (trade unions) against the bourgeoisie; 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 furthered by the improved means of communication which are
created by modern industry, and which place the workers of different
localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was
needed to centralize 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, which the burghers of the
Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries to attain,
the modern proletarians, thanks to railways achieve in a few years. This
organization 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 Hour bill in England was carried.
Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further the
course of development of the proletariat in many ways. 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 times with the
bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself
compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its 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 classes 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 process 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 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 so only 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 adopt that
of the proletariat. The "dangerous class," the social scum
(Lumpenproletariat), that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest
layers of 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. The social
conditions of the old society no longer exist for the proletariat. The
proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has
no longer anything in common with bourgeois family relations; modern
industrial 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 feudal
absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on
the contrary, instead of rising with the progress 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 an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent
to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot
help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of
being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in
other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. The
essential condition for the existence and sway of the bourgeois class is
the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is
wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the
labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition,
by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of
modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on
which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the
bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all are its own grave-diggers. Its
fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.CHAPTER II.
PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS.
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class
parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the
proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of
their own by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. The
Communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this
only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different
countries they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the
entire proletariat, independently of all nationality; 2. In the various
stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the
bourgeoisie has to pass through they always and everywhere represent the
interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists, therefore, are on the
one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the
working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward
all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass
of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of
march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian
movement. The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all
the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class,
overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the
proletariat. The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way
based on ideas or principles that have been invented or discovered by this
or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express in general terms
actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a
historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing
property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism. All
property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical
change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French
Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois
property. The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of
property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern
bourgeois private property's the final and most complete expression of the
system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class
antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense the
theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition
of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of
abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a
man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all
personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired,
self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of
the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form?
There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a
great extent already destroyed it and is still destroying it daily. Or do
you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage labour create any
property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind
of property which exploits wage labour and which cannot increase except
upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage labour for fresh
exploitation. Property in its present form is based on the antagonism of
capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To
be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal, but a social, status
in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united
action of many members- nay, in the last resort, only by the united action
of all members of society- can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore,
not a personal, it is a social, power. When, therefore, capital is
converted into common property, into the property of all members of
society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property.
It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses
its class character. Let us now take wage labour. The average price of wage
labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence
which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a
labourer. What, therefore, the wage labourer appropriates by means of his
labour merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no
means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of
labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction
of human life and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of
others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this
appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital,
and is allowed to live only insofar as the interest of the ruling class
requires it. In bourgeois society living labour is but a means to increase
accumulated labour. In Communist society accumulated labour is but a means
to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer. In bourgeois
society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society,
the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent
and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no
individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the
bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The
abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois
freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present
bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears
also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave
words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any,
only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered
traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the
Communist abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of
production, and of the bourgeoisie itself. You are horrified at our
intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society
private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the
population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in
the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending
to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose
existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of
society. In a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend. From the moment when
labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent- into a
social power capable of being monopolised- i.e., from the moment when
individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property,
into capital; from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes. You must,
therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the
bourgeois, than the middle class owner of property. This person must,
indeed, be swept out of the way and made impossible. Communism deprives no
man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does
is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means
of such appropriation. It has been objected that upon the abolition of
private property all work will cease and universal laziness will overtake
us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the
dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work acquire
nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this
objection is but another expression of the tautology: there can no longer
be any wage labour when there is no longer any capital. All objections
urged against the Communist mode of producing and appropriating material
products have in the same way been urged against the Communist modes of
producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the bourgeois
the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production
itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the
disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments,
is for the enormous majority a mere training to act as a machine. But don't
wrangle with us so long as you apply to our intended abolition of bourgeois
property the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law,
etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your
bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as yourjurisprudence is
but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential
character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of
existence of your class. The selfish misconception that induces you to
transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason the social forms
springing from your present mode of production and form of property-
historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production-
this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.
What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the
case of feudal property, you are, of course forbidden to admit in the case
of your own bourgeois form of property. Abolition of the family! Even the
most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what
foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital,
on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only
among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the
practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public
prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when
its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of
capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children
by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you will say, we
destroy the most hallowed of relations when we replace home education by
social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the
social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention of society,
direct or indirect, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not
invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to
alter the character of that intervention and to rescue education from the
influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois claptrap about the family and
education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all
the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family
ties among the proletarians are torn asunder and their children transformed
into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. But you
Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole
bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of
production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited
in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the
lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even
a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of
women as mere instruments of production. For the rest, nothing is more
ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community
of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by
the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of
women; it has existed almost from time immemorial. Our bourgeois, not
content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their
disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in
seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of
wives in common and thus at the most what the Communists might possibly be
reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a
hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized, community of women. For the
rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of
production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women
springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries
and nationality. The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them
what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire
political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must
constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in
the bourgeois sense of the word. National differences and antagonisms
between peoples are vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the
development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world
market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of
life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause
them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized
countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of
the proletariat. In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by
another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will
also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes
within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will
come to an end. The charges against Communism made from a religious, a
philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint are not
deserving of serious examination. Does it require deep intuition to
comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conceptions- in one word, man's
consciousness- changes with every change in the conditions of his material
existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does
the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes its
character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas
of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak
of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that
within the old society the elements of a new one have been created and that
the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of
the old conditions of existence. When the ancient world was in its last
throes the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian
ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society
fought its death-battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas
of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to
the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge. "Undoubtedly,"
it will be said, "religion, moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have
been modified in the course of historical development. But religion,
morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this
change." "There are, besides, eternal truths such as freedom, justice,
etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes
eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of
constituting them on a new basis; it, therefore, acts in contradiction to
all past historical experience." What does this accusation reduce itself
to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of
class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different
epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all
past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No
wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the
multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or
general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total
disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most
radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its
development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. But
let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism. We have seen
above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to
raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish
democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest by
degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of
production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as
the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly
as possible. Of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by
means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions
of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear
economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the
movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old
social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing
the mode of production. These measures will, of course, be different in
different countries. Nevertheless, in the most advanced countries the
following will be pretty generally applicable: 1. Abolition of property in
land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy
progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of
inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a
national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6.
Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of
the state. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by
the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the
improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8.
Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies,
especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with
manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town
and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the
country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition
of child factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with
industrial production, etc. When in the course of development class
distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in
the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will
lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is
merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the
proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled by the
force of circumstances to organize itself as a class; if by means of a
revolution it makes itself the ruling class and, as such, sweeps away by
force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these
conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class
antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its
own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its
classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the
free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
CHAPTER III.SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE.
1. Reactionary Socialism a. Feudal Socialism Owing to their historical
position it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England
to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French
revolution of July, 1830, and in the English reform agitation these
aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a
serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary
battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the
old cries of the Restoration period* had become impossible.
*Not the English Restoration, 1660 to 1689, but the French Restoration,
1814 to 1830.
In order to arouse sympathy the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight,
apparently, of its own interests and to formulate its indictment against
the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus
the aristocracy took its revenge by singing lampoons against its new
master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming
catastrophe. In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half
lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its
bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very
heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effect through total incapacity
to comprehend the march of modern history. The aristocracy, in order to
rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a
banner. But the people, as often as it joined them, saw on their
hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms and deserted with loud and
irreverent laughter. One section of the French Legitimists, and "Young
England," exhibited this spectacle. In pointing out that their mode of
exploitation was different from that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists
forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were
quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that under their
rule the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern
bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society. For
the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their
criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to
this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed which is
destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society. What they
upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat
as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat. In political practice,
therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class;
and in ordinary life, despite their highfalutin phrases they stoop to pick
up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter
truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potatospirits.*
*This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and
squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own
account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar
manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British
aristocrats are as yet rather above that; but they, too, know how to make
up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters of more or less
shady joint-stock companies.
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical
Socialism with Feudal Socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian
asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against
private property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached
in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of
the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the
holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the
aristocrat.
b. Petty Bourgeois Socialism The feudal aristocracy was not the only class
that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of
existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society.
The mediaeval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the
precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but
little developed industrially and commercially these two classes still
vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie. In countries where
modern civilization has become fully developed a new class of petty
bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie
and ever renewing itsel

My Comrades, Today you shall join me in my new political philosophy Sommunism. Sommunism is half communism and half socialism. My fellow comrades join me today. LONG LIVE SOMMUNISM!

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