The Communist Manifesto

Contents

1. Preface to the English Edition of 1888 13 min 22

   Written by Engels in 1888, five years after Marx's death, for the first authorised English translation. He traces the Manifesto's history: commissioned by the Communist League in 1847, eclipsed after the defeats of 1848 and the Cologne Communist trial, then revived with the rise of the international workers' movement until it became “the most widespread, the most international production of all Socialist literature.” He explains why the authors chose the name communist (in 1847 socialism was a respectable middle-class movement, communism a working-class one) and credits Marx with the Manifesto's central idea, the materialist conception of history. Finally he quotes the authors' 1872 preface: the principles still stand, but the ten measures of Section II, the survey in Section III and the alliances in Section IV are dated, and the Paris Commune showed that workers “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery.”

2. Preamble 1 min 9

   The governments of Europe are united in fear of communism, and “communist” has become a universal political insult. Two conclusions follow: communism is already recognised as a power, and communists should now state their views openly instead of letting their enemies define them. The Manifesto, drafted for an international meeting in London, is that statement.

3. I Bourgeois and Proletarians 32 min 71

   History is the history of class struggles, and modern society is simplifying into two classes: the bourgeoisie, who own capital, and the proletariat, who must sell their labour to live. The section traces the bourgeoisie's rise from medieval towns through world trade and the industrial revolution, and gives a famously admiring account of its achievements: it has swept away feudal ties, revolutionised production, created a world market and built more productive power in a century than all previous generations.

   But these productive forces now outgrow capitalist property relations, as recurring crises of overproduction show. Capitalism also creates its own opponents. Workers, degraded into appendages of machines and paid subsistence wages, are concentrated in factories and cities, connected by railways, and gradually organised into unions and a political class. The section ends by predicting that the bourgeoisie's fall and the proletariat's victory are inevitable.

4. II Proletarians and Communists 23 min 63

   Communists are not a separate sect; they are the most resolute and far-sighted part of the workers' movement, aiming at the conquest of political power by the working class. The section then answers the standard objections. Communists want to abolish not personal property but bourgeois property, capital used to command others' labour, which most people already lack. They respond in turn to charges that communism would destroy freedom, individuality, culture, the family, education, nationality, religion and morality, arguing in each case that these are already shaped, and often hollowed out, by class society, and that “ruling ideas” are the ideas of the ruling class.

   It closes with a program: winning “the battle of democracy,” then centralising production in the hands of the state through ten measures, from a progressive income tax and free education to abolition of inheritance and of private property in land. Ultimately classes, and with them the political state, would disappear, leaving “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

5. III Socialist and Communist Literature 25 min 43

   A polemical survey of rival socialist schools, each explained by the class interest it serves. Reactionary socialism includes aristocrats who attack capitalism in the name of a feudal past, small-proprietor socialists like Sismondi who want to restore small production, and German “True Socialists” who turned French class politics into abstract philosophy and thereby aided absolutism. Conservative or bourgeois socialism, exemplified by Proudhon, seeks reforms to preserve capitalism, “a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.” Critical-utopian socialism (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) offered valuable criticism and bold ideas but tried to design ideal societies and appeal to the rich, and its followers have become conservative sects. The authors later called this section dated.

6. IV Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties 3 min 17

   A brief guide to alliances on the eve of 1848: with the Chartists in England and agrarian reformers in America, the democratic socialists in France, the Radicals in Switzerland, the agrarian-revolutionary nationalists in Poland, and the bourgeoisie against absolutism in Germany, where a bourgeois revolution is expected to be followed immediately by a proletarian one. Communists support every revolutionary movement, always raise the property question, and openly declare that their aims require the forcible overthrow of existing conditions. The pamphlet ends: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”