The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for
the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but
in the movement of the present they also represent and take care of
the future of that movement. In France the Communists ally
themselves with the Social-Democrats* against the conservative and
radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a
critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally
handed down from the great Revolution.

  *The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in
literature by Louis Blanc, in the daily press by the Reforme. The name
of Social-Democracy signifies, with these its inventors, a section
of the Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with
Socialism.

  In Switzerland they support the Radicals without losing sight of the
fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of
Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical
bourgeois.

  In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian
revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that
party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.

  In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a
revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal
squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.

  But they never cease for a single instant to instill into the
working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile
antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the
German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the
bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the
bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and
in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany,
the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.

  The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany because
that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound
to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European
civilization and with a much more developed proletariat than what
existed in England in the 17th and in France in the 18th century,
and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the
prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.

  In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary
movement against the existing social and political order of things.

  In all these movements they bring to the front as the leading
question in each case the property question, no matter what its degree
of development at the time.

  Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the
democratic parties of all countries.

  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 Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to
lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

  Workingmen of all countries, unite!

                            -THE END-
.