Manifesto of the Communist Party
A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of
communism. All the powers of old Europe have
entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in
power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism,
against the more advanced opposition parties, as
well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a
power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world,
publish their views, their aims, their tendenc
ies, and meet this nursery tale of the
Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationaliti
es have assembled in London and sketched the
following manifesto, to be published in the Englis
h, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish
languages.
I. Bourgeois and Proletarians
*
The history of all hitherto existing society
†
is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and pl
ebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
‡
and journeyman, in a
word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight th
at each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in
the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost
everywhere a complicated arrangement of society
into various orders, a manifold gradation of soci
al rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians,
knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages,
feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,
apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done
away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,
new forms of struggle in place of the old one.