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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 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.

I. Bourgeois and Proletarians*

The history of all hitherto existing society†

is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, 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 that 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 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.

*

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. [Engels, 1888 English edition]

†

That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded

history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in

Russia, Georg Ludwig von 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 organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by

Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With

the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic

classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second

edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]

‡

Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]