III.The Communist Manifesto
1.Bourgeois and Proletarians
“Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”
“The modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.”
“The bourgeoisie has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superior' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the glove. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.”
Industries suddenly stop using up only local resources, they use resources from all over the world. Consumers start having different wishes, they want imports: “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.” Intellectual property as well begins to be sold. Ex: “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”
-> “The bourgeoisie creates a world after its own image.”
Problem: “The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.”
The bourgeois think that the solution is creating new markets, conquering new markets, but yet, that makes the crisis even deeper. They create masses of proletarians – people who are nothing more than appendages to the machine.
The class struggle begins as wages decrease. The workers hate being overlooked by the machines, by the bourgeois over-seers, they start fighting by building unions.-> attacks on machines.
“The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers due to competition, by their revolutionary combinations due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates product. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
2. Proletarians and Communists:
Communists are “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.”
“They have no interests separate and apart of from those of the proletariat as a whole.”
“The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”
“Abolition of private property.”
“All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation (appropriation that only covers minimum existence), under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.”
“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 labor of others by means of such appropriation.”
“When in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of associated individuals, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
3. Socialist and Communist Literature
4. Position of the Communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, UNITE!”
