Manifesto of the Communist Party

24 

Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists 

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 appropriations.  

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: that there can no 

longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.  

All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material 

products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic mode 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, &c. Your very ideas are but the 

outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your 

jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character 

and direction are determined by the economical 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 [Aufhebung] 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 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 direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? 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 clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents 

and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the 

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25 

Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists 

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 bourgeoisie in chorus.  

The bourgeois sees 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 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 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 legalised 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 working men 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 antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, 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 civilised 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 will also be 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 conception, 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 the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that 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 

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