The Communist Manifesto:
By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Bourgeoisie: class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor.
Proletariat: 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.
The history of all hitherto society (in written history) is the history of class struggles. Oppressor and oppressed,
stood in constant opposition to one another. 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.
The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colinization 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.
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. In proportion to 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 a product of a
long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange. Each step in
the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. 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 bourgeoisie as a whole.
This 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 fervor, 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 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 cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the
relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. The need of a constantly expanding market
for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. The bourgeoisie has through its
exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
In place of old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction
the products of distant lands and climes. In place of 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. It creates a world after its
own image.
It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.
The necessary consequence of this was political centralization acted upon by the economical and political sway of
the bourgeois class. In these crises a great part not only of 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 overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back
into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if 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. This brings disorder
into the whole of the bourgeois society, endangers the existence of bourgeois property. And how does the
bourgeoisie get over these crises? By conquest of new markets, and by 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.
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. A class of laborers, who live
only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers,
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. The proletariat man 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 propogation of his race. But the price of a
commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the
repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. 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 lower strata of the middle class- the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, and 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. 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 labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. Thereupon the
workers begin to form combinations (Trade Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up
the rates 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. This organization of the proletarians into a
class, and consequently into a poitical party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the
workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. Entire sections of the ruling classes
are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or at least are threatened in their conditions of
existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
The modern laborer, 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. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common
with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labor, 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.
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 proletarian have nothing to secure and to fortify; their mission
is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property. 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.