1848

                              COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

                                  by Karl Marx

                           Translated by Samuel Moore
INTRO

  COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

  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 Czar, 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 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 tendencies,
and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a
manifesto of the party itself.

  To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in
London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the
English, French, German, Italian, Flemish, and Danish languages.

  CHAPTER I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS.*

  *By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners
of the means of social production, and employers of wage labour; by
proletariat the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of
production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power
in order to live.

  The history of all hitherto existing society* is the history of
class struggles.

  *That is, all written history. In 1837, the pre-history of
society, the social organization existing previous to recorded
history, was all but unknown. Since then Haxthausen discovered
common ownership of land in Russia; Maurer proved it to be the
social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history,
and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been,
the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The
inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid
bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery of the
true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the
dissolution of these primaeval communities society begins to be
differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I
have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in The Origin of
the Family, Private Property and the State.

  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-masters* 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 that each time
ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or
in the common ruin of the contending classes.

  *Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within,
not a head of a guild.

  In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a
complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold
gradation of social 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 ones.

  Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this
distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms.
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.

  From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of
the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the
bourgeoisie were developed.

  The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up
fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese
markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the
increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave
to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before
known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering