Manifesto of the Communist Party

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Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871 

the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was 

but a parasitic excrescence.  

While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its 

legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society 

itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six 

years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal 

suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every 

other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known 

that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right 

man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other 

hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal 

suffrage by hierarchical investiture.

12

  

It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts 

of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, 

this new Commune, which breaks with the modern state power, has been mistaken for a 

reproduction of the medieval Communes, which first preceded, and afterward became the 

substratum of, that very state power. The Communal Constitution has been mistaken for an 

attempt to break up into the federation of small states, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the 

Girondins

13

, that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has 

now become a powerful coefficient of social production. The antagonism of the Commune 

against the state power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against 

over-centralization. Peculiar historical circumstances may have prevented the classical 

development, as in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may have allowed, as in 

England, to complete the great central state organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors, and 

ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary magistrates in the counties.  

The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto 

absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this 

one act, it would have initiated the regeneration of France.  

The provincial French bourgeois saw in the Commune an attempt to restore the sway their order 

had held over the country under Louis Philippe, and which, under Louis Napoleon, was 

supplanted by the pretended rule of the country over the towns. In reality, the Communal 

Constitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their 

districts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests. The 

very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no 

longer as a check upon the now superseded state power. It could only enter into the head of a 

Bismarck – who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume his 

old trade, so befitting his mental calibre, of contributor to Kladderadatsch (the Berlin Punch

14

) – 

it could only enter into such a head to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after the 

caricature of the old French municipal organization of 1791, the Prussian municipal constitution 

which degrades the town governments to mere secondary wheels in the police machinery of the 

Prussian state. The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions – cheap government 

– a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure: the standing army and state 

functionarism. Its very existence presupposed the non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at 

least, is the normal encumbrance and indispensable cloak of class rule. It supplied the republic 

with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the “true 

republic” was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants.  

The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity 

of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political 

form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret 

was this: It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the 

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Third Address to the International Working Men’s Association, May 1871 

producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to 

work out the economical emancipation of labor.  

Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a 

delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social 

slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation 

upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor emancipated, 

every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.  

It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, 

about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their 

own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of 

present society with its two poles of capital and wage-slavery (the landlord now is but the 

sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin 

innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its 

prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the 

basis of all civilization!  

Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of 

the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to 

make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now 

chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated 

labor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! Why, those member of the ruling 

classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system 

– and they are many – have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative 

production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the 

capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon 

common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy 

and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, 

would it be but communism, “possible” communism?  

The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias 

to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, 

and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own 

economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic 

processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the 

elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the 

full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working 

class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with pen and 

inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their 

ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.  

When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain 

working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their “natural 

superiors,” and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed it at salaries the highest 

of which barely amounted to one-fifth what, according to high scientific authority

*

, is the 

minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school-board – the old world writhed 

in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labor, floating 

over the Hôtel de Ville.  

And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the 

only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris bourgeois – 

shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants – the wealthy capitalist alone excepted. The Commune had 

                                                      

*

 

Professor Huxley. [Note to the German addition of 1871.]

 

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