{UAH} SUNDAY READING: INTRODUCTION TO SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM.

My friends,

Written in 1848 by the German philosopher Karl Marx, the Communist
Manifesto soon established itself as one of the greatest ever tracts
in the history of mankind. Powerful and emotive, yet penned with
sublime simplicity, the Manifesto attempts a dialectical explanation
of the world that no other economist or scientist had done before. The
passion with which it is written makes it a living document. The world
crisis it analysed are still with us today, almost to the letter and
his solutions are still as relevant as they were in 1848 when he wrote
it. I first read the Manifesto as a 17 year old first year law
student, and I have read it more than 10,000 times since. Reading it
for the first time, I felt caught up in the highest form of elation I
had never felt before. It was as if I had been blind before, but my
eyes had been opened. Karl Marx had not only disentangled the complex
mystery of world poverty and suffering, he had actually also
prescribed a solution to them.
I recommend everyone to read the Manifesto, beginning with these magical pages.

George Okello



Manifesto of the Communist Party

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the
powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise
this spectre: Pope and Tsar, 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 is the opposition that
has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the
more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary
adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be
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 Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of
the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in
London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the
English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

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Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians(1)

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[German Original]

The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of
class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master(3) 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.
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
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(4): 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 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.
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.
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.
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
yet, for a time, able to do so. 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 bourgeois. 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 equalised, 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 increasing 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 (Trades' Unions)
against the bourgeois; 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 helped on by the
improved means of communication that are created by modern industry,
and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one
another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise 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, to attain which the burghers of the Middle
Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern
proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation 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-hours' bill in
England was carried.
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further,
in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. 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 time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In
all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the
proletariat, to ask for 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 class
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
progress 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 only so 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 place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The "dangerous class", [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that
passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the 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.
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are
already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his
relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common
with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry 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 the feudal
absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer,
on the contrary, instead of rising with the process 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 over-riding
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 conditions for the existence and for the 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 the 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.


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