Manifesto of the Communist Party

51 

Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 

being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the 

elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new 

needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the 

stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as 

progress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, 

will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as 

manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of 

industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of 

everyone.  

The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property and 

is held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existing 

improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward 

which will assure to society all the products it needs.  

In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members.  

The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary. 

Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order. The existence of 

classes originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up to 

the present, will completely disappear. For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough to 

bring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities of 

the men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development.  

Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way of 

life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way, 

communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, will 

both require an entirely different kind of human material.  

People will no longer be, as they are today, subordinated to a single branch of production, bound 

to it, exploited by it; they will no longer develop one of their faculties at the expense of all others; 

they will no longer know only one branch, or one branch of a single branch, of production as a 

whole. Even industry as it is today is finding such people less and less useful.  

Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-

rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of 

production in its entirety.  

The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory 

worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will 

completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with 

the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response 

to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided 

character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist 

society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed 

faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that 

society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one 

hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class 

differences on the other.  

A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear. The 

management of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classes 

of people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association. 

The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrial 

population into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both 

agriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development.  

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52 

Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith 

The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the 

forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of 

all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs 

of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the 

capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, 

through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by 

all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country – these are the 

main consequences of the abolition of private property.  

– 21 –  

What will be the influence of communist society on the 

family? 

It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only 

the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it 

does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way 

removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the 

women on the man, and of the children on the parents.  

And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the “community of 

women”. Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and 

which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private 

property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, 

in fact abolishes it.  

– 22 –  

What will be the attitude of communism to existing 

nationalities? 

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of 

community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby 

to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the 

abolition of their basis, private property.

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– 23 –  

What will be its attitude to existing religions? 

All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual 

peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which 

makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance.

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– 24 –  

How do communists differ from socialists? 

The so-called socialists are divided into three categories.  

[ Reactionary Socialists: ]  

The first category consists of adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been 

destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, 

bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and 

patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, all 

their proposals are directed to this end.  

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