Manifesto of the Communist Party

21 

Manifesto of the Communist Party 

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.  

 

---

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 the 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 other proletarian parties: 

formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the 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 is 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 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 the 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 

---

23 

Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists 

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 only 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 in so far 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 bourgeois 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 Communistic 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 one 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.  

---