Manifesto of the Communist Party

56 

Demands of the Communist Party in Germany 

Demands of the Communist Party in Germany 

“Workers of all countries, unite!” 

1. The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic. 

2. Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and to be elected, 

provided he has not been convicted of a criminal offence. 

3. Representatives of the people shall receive payment so that workers, too, shall be able to 

become members of the German parliament. 

4. Universal arming of the people. In future the armies shall be simultaneously labour armies, so 

that the troops shall not, as formerly, merely consume, but shall produce more than is necessary 

for their upkeep. 

This will moreover be conducive to the organisation of labour. 

5. Legal services shall be free of charge. 

6. All feudal obligations, dues, corvées, tithes etc., which have hitherto weighed upon the rural 

population, shall be abolished without compensation. 

7. Princely and other feudal estates, together with mines, pits, and so forth, shall become the 

property of the state. The estates shall be cultivated on a large scale and with the most up-to-date 

scientific devices in the interests of the whole of society. 

8. Mortgages on peasant lands shall be declared the property of the state. Interest on such 

mortgages shall be paid by the peasants to the state. 

9. In localities where the tenant system is developed, the land rent or the quit-rent shall be paid to 

the state as a tax. 

The measures specified in Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 9 are to be adopted in order to reduce the communal 

and other burdens hitherto imposed upon the peasants and small tenant farmers without curtailing 

the means available for defraying state expenses and without imperilling production. 

The landowner in the strict sense, who is neither a peasant nor a tenant farmer, has no share in 

production. Consumption on his part is, therefore, nothing but abuse. 

10. A state bank, whose paper issues are legal tender, shall replace all private banks. 

This measure will make it possible to regulate the credit system in the interest of the people as a 

whole, and will thus undermine the dominion of the big financial magnates. Further, by gradually 

substituting paper money for gold and silver coin, the universal means of exchange (that 

indispensable prerequisite of bourgeois trade and commerce) will be cheapened, and gold and 

silver will be set free for use in foreign trade. Finally, this measure is necessary in order to bind 

the interests of the conservative bourgeoisie to the Government. 

11. All the means of transport, railways, canals, steamships, roads, the posts etc. shall be taken 

over by the state. They shall become the property of the state and shall be placed free at the 

disposal of the impecunious classes. 

12. All civil servants shall receive the same salary, the only exception being that civil servants 

who have a family to support and who therefore have greater requirements, shall receive a higher 

salary. 

13. Complete separation of Church and State. The clergy of every denomination shall be paid 

only by the voluntary contributions of their congregations. 

14. The right of inheritance to be curtailed. 

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57 

Demands of the Communist Party in Germany 

15. The introduction of steeply graduated taxes, and the abolition of taxes on articles of 

consumption. 

16. Inauguration of national workshops. The state guarantees a livelihood to all workers and 

provides for those who are incapacitated for work. 

17. Universal and free education of the people. 

It is to the interest of the German proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie and the small peasants to 

support these demands with all possible energy. Only by the realisation of these demands will the 

millions in Germany, who have hitherto been exploited by a handful of persons and whom the 

exploiters would like to keep in further subjection, win the rights and attain to that power to 

which they are entitled as the producers of all wealth. 

The Committee 

Karl Marx, Karl Schapper, H. Bauer, F. Engels, J. Moll, W. Wolff 

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The Paris Commune. 

Address to the International Workingmen’s Association, May 1871 

The “Paris Commune” was composed by Karl Marx as an address to the General Council of the 

International, and included in a book, “The Civil War in France,” with the aim of distributing to 

workers of all countries a clear understanding of the character and world-wide significance of the 

heroic struggle of the Communards and their historical experience to learn from. The book was widely 

circulated by 1872 it was translated into several languages and published throughout Europe and the 

United States. 

The first address was delivered on July 23rd, 1870, five days after the beginning of the Franco-

Prussian War. The second address, delivered on September 9, 1870, gave a historical overview of the 

events a week after the army of Bonaparte was defeated. The third address, delivered on May 30, 

1871, two days after the defeat of the Paris Commune – detailed the significance and the underlining 

causes of the first workers government ever created. 

The Civil War in France was originally published by Marx as only the third address, only the first 

half of which is reproduced here. In 1891, on the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels 

put together a new collection of the work. Engels decided to include the first two addresses that 

Marx made to the International. 

The Address is included here because it can be regarded as an amendment to the Manifesto, 

clarifying a number of issues relating to the state based on the experience of the Commune. 

On the dawn of March 18, Paris arose to the thunder-burst of “Vive la Commune!” What is the 

Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?  

“The proletarians of Paris,” said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, “amidst the 

failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to 

save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.... They have 

understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of 

their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.”  

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield 

it for its own purposes.  

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, 

clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of 

labor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent bourgeois society as a 

mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all 

manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, 

and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century 

swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last 

hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself 

the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.  

During the subsequent regimes, the government, placed under parliamentary control – that is, 

under the direct control of the propertied classes – became not only a hotbed of huge national 

debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it became 

not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; 

but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the 

same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class 

antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of 

the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an 

engine of class despotism.  

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