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Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
Manifesto of the Communist Party 1
The Manifesto of the Communist Party is the greatest program document of scientific communism. “This small book is worth entire volumes: the entire organized and fighting proletariat of the civilized world lives and moves in its spirit to this day” (Lenin). Written by K. Marx and F. Engels as the program of the Communist League, the Manifesto of the Communist Party was first published in London in February 1848 as a separate edition of 23 pages. In March–July 1848, the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was published in the democratic organ of German emigrants “Deutsche Londoner Zeitung” (“German London Newspaper”). The German text was also reprinted in London in 1848 in the form of a separate 30-page pamphlet, in which some typos from the first edition were corrected and punctuation was improved. This text was subsequently used by Marx and Engels as the basis for subsequent authorized publications. In 1848, translations of the Manifesto were also made into a number of European languages (French, Polish, Italian, Danish, Flemish and Swedish). The names of the authors of the Manifesto were not mentioned in the 1848 editions; they were first mentioned in print in 1850 with the publication of the first English translation in the Chartist organ Red Republican, in a preface written by the editor of that magazine, J. Gurney.
In 1872, a new German edition of the Manifesto was published with minor amendments by the author and with a preface by Marx and Engels. This publication, like subsequent German editions in 1883 and 1890, was published under the title “Communist Manifesto.”
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party was published in 1869 in Geneva, translated by Bakunin, who distorted the contents of the Manifesto in a number of places. The shortcomings of the first edition were eliminated in the edition published in Geneva in 1882, translated by Plekhanov. Plekhanov's translation marked the beginning of the widespread dissemination of the ideas of the Manifesto in Russia. Attaching great importance to the propaganda of Marxism in Russia, Marx and Engels wrote a special preface to this publication.
After Marx's death, a number of editions of the Manifesto were published, reviewed by Engels: in 1883, a German edition with a preface by Engels; in 1888, an English edition translated by S. Moore, edited by Engels and provided with a preface and notes; in 1890, a German edition with a new preface by Engels. Engels also wrote several notes for the latest edition. In 1885, the newspaper Socialiste (Socialist) published a French translation of the Manifesto, made by Marx's daughter Laura Lafargue and reviewed by Engels. Engels wrote the preface to the Polish edition of the Manifesto in 1892 and to the Italian edition in 1893. – 419.
A ghost is haunting Europe - the specter of communism. All the forces of old Europe united in the sacred persecution of this ghost: the pope and the tsar, Metternich and Guizot, the French radicals and the German police.
Where is the opposition party that its opponents in power would not denounce as communist? Where is the opposition party that would not, in turn, throw the stigmatizing accusation of communism at both the more advanced representatives of the opposition and its reactionary opponents?
Two conclusions follow from this fact.
Communism is already recognized as a force by all European forces.
It’s time for communists to openly state their views, their goals, their aspirations in front of the whole world and counter the manifesto of the party itself with fairy tales about the ghost of communism.
To this end, communists of various nationalities gathered in London and compiled the following "Manifesto", which is published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish.
I
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS 2
The bourgeoisie is understood as the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production, using hired labor. By the proletariat is meant the class of modern wage workers who, being deprived of their own means of production, are forced, in order to live, to sell their labor power. (Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888)
The history of all hitherto existing societies 3
That is, the whole history that has come down to us in written sources. In 1847, the prehistory of society, the social organization that preceded all written history, was still almost completely unknown. In the time that has elapsed since then, Haxthausen discovered communal ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved that it was the social basis that served as the starting point for the historical development of all German tribes, and it gradually became clear that the rural community with common ownership of land is or was in the past everywhere primitive form of society, from India to Ireland. The internal organization of this primitive communist society, in its typical form, was elucidated by Morgan, who crowned the matter with his discovery of the true nature of the clan and its position in the tribe. With the disintegration of this primitive community, the stratification of society into special and ultimately antagonistic classes begins. I have attempted to trace this process of disintegration in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats, 2. Aufl., Stuttgart, 1886 (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1886) . (Engels's note to the 1888 English edition) (218)
It was a story of class struggle. 4
Engels also included this note in the 1890 German edition of the Communist Manifesto, omitting only the last sentence. – 424.
Free and slave, patrician and plebeian, landowner and serf, master 5
A workshop foreman is a full member of the workshop, a foreman within the workshop, and not its foreman. (Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888)
And the apprentice, in short, the oppressor and the oppressed were in eternal antagonism to each other, waged a continuous, sometimes hidden, sometimes open struggle, always ending in a revolutionary reorganization of the entire social edifice or the general death of the fighting classes.
In previous historical epochs we find almost everywhere a complete division of society into different classes, a whole ladder of different social positions. In Ancient Rome we meet patricians, horsemen, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages - feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, apprentices, serfs, and besides, in almost each of these classes there were also special gradations.
Modern bourgeois society, which emerged from the depths of the lost feudal society, did not destroy class contradictions. It only put new classes, new conditions of oppression and new forms of struggle in the place of the old ones.
Our era, the era of the bourgeoisie, is distinguished, however, in that it has simplified class contradictions: society is increasingly split into two large hostile camps, into two large classes facing each other - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages came the free population of the first cities; From this class of townspeople the first elements of the bourgeoisie developed.
The discovery of America and the sea route around Africa created a new field of activity for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, exchange with the colonies, the increase in the number of means of exchange and goods in general gave a hitherto unheard of impetus to trade, navigation, industry and thereby caused the rapid development of a revolutionary element in a disintegrating feudal society.
The old feudal or guild organization of industry could no longer satisfy the demand that was growing with the new markets. Manufactory took its place. The guild masters were supplanted by the industrial middle class; The division of labor between the various corporations disappeared, giving way to the division of labor within the individual workshop.
But the markets kept growing, demand kept increasing. Even the manufacture could no longer satisfy him. Then steam and the machine revolutionized industry. The place of manufacture was taken by modern large-scale industry, the place of the industrial middle class was taken by millionaire industrialists, leaders of entire industrial armies, and modern bourgeois.
Large industry created a world market prepared by the discovery of America. The world market caused a colossal development of trade, navigation and land communications. This in turn had an impact on the expansion of industry, and to the same extent that industry, trade, shipping, and railways grew, the bourgeoisie developed, it increased its capital and pushed into the background all the classes inherited from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, that the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long process of development, a series of revolutions in the mode of production and exchange.
Each of these stages of development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by corresponding political success. An oppressed class under the rule of feudal lords, an armed and self-governing association in the commune, 6
In France, nascent cities were called “communes” even before the time when they won local self-government and the political rights of the “third estate” from their feudal lords and masters. Generally speaking, here England is taken as a typical country of economic development of the bourgeoisie, and France as a typical country of its political development. (Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888)
Commune - this is what the townspeople of Italy and France called their urban community after they bought or won the first rights of self-government from their feudal masters. (Engels's note to the German edition of 1890)
Here is an independent urban republic, there is a third, tax-paying estate of the monarchy, 7
In the English edition of 1888, edited by Engels, after the words “independent urban republic” the words are inserted: “(as in Italy and Germany)”, and after the words “third, taxable estate of the monarchy” - “(as in France)”. Ed.
Then, during the period of manufacture, it was a counterweight to the nobility in the class or absolute monarchy and the main basis of large monarchies in general; finally, since the establishment of large-scale industry and the world market, it gained exclusive political dominance in the modern representative state. Modern state power is only a committee managing the general affairs of the entire bourgeois class.
The bourgeoisie played an extremely revolutionary role in history.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has achieved dominance, has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. She mercilessly broke the motley feudal shackles that tied man to his “natural overlords,” and left no other connection between people except bare interest, a heartless “purity.” In the icy water of selfish calculation, she drowned the sacred thrill of religious ecstasy, knightly enthusiasm, and bourgeois sentimentality. It transformed a person's personal dignity into exchange value and replaced the countless granted and acquired freedoms with one unscrupulous freedom of trade. In a word, it replaced exploitation covered by religious and political illusions with open, shameless, direct, callous exploitation.
The bourgeoisie deprived of the sacred aura all kinds of activities that until then were considered honorable and looked upon with reverent awe. She turned a doctor, a lawyer, a priest, a poet, a man of science into her paid employees.
The bourgeoisie tore away their touching-sentimental veil from family relationships and reduced them to purely monetary relations.
The bourgeoisie showed that the brute display of force in the Middle Ages, so admired by the reactionaries, found its natural complement in laziness and immobility. It showed for the first time what human activity could achieve. She created miracles of art, but of a completely different kind than the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; She made completely different campaigns than the migration of peoples and the Crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly causing revolutions in the instruments of production, without, therefore, revolutionizing the relations of production, and therefore the entire totality of social relations. On the contrary, the first condition for the existence of all former industrial classes was the preservation of the old mode of production unchanged. Continuous revolutions in production, continuous upheaval of all social relations, eternal uncertainty and movement distinguish the bourgeois era from all others. All frozen, rusty relationships, along with their accompanying, time-honored ideas and views, are destroyed, all that arise again turn out to be outdated before they have time to ossify. Everything classy and stagnant disappears, everything sacred is desecrated, and people finally come to the need to look with sober eyes at their situation in life and their mutual relationships.
The need for ever-increasing sales of products drives the bourgeoisie around the globe. It must penetrate everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie, through the exploitation of the world market, made the production and consumption of all countries cosmopolitan. To the great chagrin of the reactionaries, it snatched the national soil from under the feet of industry. The original national industries have been destroyed and continue to be destroyed every day. They are being replaced by new industries, the introduction of which becomes a matter of life for all civilized nations - industries that no longer process local raw materials, but raw materials imported from the most remote regions of the globe, and produce manufactured products consumed not only within a given country, but also in all parts of the world. Instead of old needs that were satisfied by domestic products, new ones arise, the satisfaction of which requires products from the most distant countries and the most diverse climates. The old local and national isolation and existence at the expense of products of their own production is being replaced by comprehensive communication and comprehensive dependence of nations on each other. This applies equally to both material and spiritual production. The fruits of the spiritual activity of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the multitude of national and local literatures one world literature is formed.
The bourgeoisie, through the rapid improvement of all instruments of production and the endless facilitation of the means of communication, is drawing into civilization all, even the most barbarous, nations. The cheap prices of her goods are the heavy artillery with which she destroys all Chinese walls and forces the barbarians' most stubborn hatred of foreigners to capitulate. Under pain of destruction, it forces all nations to accept the bourgeois mode of production, forces them to introduce so-called civilization, that is, to become bourgeois. In a word, she creates a world for herself in her own image and likeness.
The bourgeoisie subordinated the countryside to the dominance of the city. She created huge cities, greatly increased the size of the urban population compared to the rural one, and thus wrested a significant part of the population from the idiocy of village life. Just as she made the village dependent on the city, so she made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on civilized countries, peasant peoples on bourgeois peoples, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie is increasingly destroying the fragmentation of the means of production, property and population. It concentrated the population, centralized the means of production, and concentrated property in the hands of a few. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent regions connected almost exclusively by alliances with different interests, laws, governments and customs duties, found themselves united into one nation, with one government, with one legislation, with one national class interest, with one customs border.
The bourgeoisie, in less than a hundred years of its class rule, has created more numerous and more ambitious productive forces than all previous generations combined. The conquest of the forces of nature, machine production, the use of chemistry in industry and agriculture, shipping, railways, the electric telegraph, the development of entire parts of the world for agriculture, the adaptation of rivers for navigation, entire masses of population, as if summoned from underground - which of the previous centuries could suspect that such productive forces lie dormant in the depths of social labor!
So, we have seen that the means of production and exchange, on the basis of which the bourgeoisie was formed, were created in feudal society. At a certain stage of development of these means of production and exchange, the relations in which the production and exchange of feudal society took place, the feudal organization of agriculture and industry, in a word, feudal property relations, no longer corresponded to the developed productive forces. They slowed down production instead of developing it. They became his shackles. They had to be broken, and they were broken.
Their place was taken by free competition, with its corresponding social and political system, with the economic and political dominance of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is taking place before our eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its bourgeois relations of production and exchange, bourgeois property relations, which has created, as if by magic, such powerful means of production and exchange, is like a wizard who is no longer able to cope with the underground forces summoned by his spells. For several decades now, the history of industry and trade has been nothing but the history of the indignation of modern productive forces against modern production relations, against those property relations that are the condition for the existence of the bourgeoisie and its rule. It is enough to point out the trade crises, which, returning periodically, more and more menacingly call into question the existence of the entire bourgeois society. During trade crises, each time a significant part of not only manufactured products is destroyed, but even the productive forces that have already been created. During crises, a social epidemic breaks out, which would have seemed absurd to all previous eras - the epidemic of overproduction. Society finds itself suddenly thrown back to a state of sudden barbarism, as if famine, a general devastating war had deprived it of all means of subsistence; it seems that industry and trade have been destroyed - and why? Because society has too much civilization, has too many means of subsistence, has too much industry and trade. The productive forces at his disposal no longer serve the development of bourgeois property relations; on the contrary, they have become prohibitively large for these relations, bourgeois relations retard their development; and when the productive forces begin to overcome these obstacles, they upset the entire bourgeois society and threaten the existence of bourgeois property. Bourgeois relations became too narrow to accommodate the wealth they created. – How does the bourgeoisie overcome crises? On the one hand, through the forced destruction of an entire mass of productive forces, on the other hand, through the conquest of new markets and more thorough exploitation of old ones. What, therefore? Because it prepares for more comprehensive and more devastating crises and reduces the means to counter them.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie overthrew feudalism are now directed against the bourgeoisie itself.
But the bourgeoisie not only forged the weapon that would bring death to it; it also gave birth to people who will direct these weapons against it - modern workers, proletarians.
To the same extent that the bourgeoisie, that is, capital, develops, so does the proletariat, the class of modern workers, who can only exist when they find work, and find it only as long as their labor increases capital. These workers, forced to sell themselves piece by piece, are a commodity like any other article of trade, and are therefore equally subject to all the accidents of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
As a result of the increasing use of machines and the division of labor, the work of the proletarians lost all independent character, and at the same time all attractiveness for the worker. The worker becomes a simple appendage of the machine; only the simplest, most monotonous, and easiest-to-learn techniques are required of him. The costs of the worker are therefore reduced almost exclusively to the means of subsistence necessary for his maintenance and the continuation of his line. But the price of any commodity, and therefore of labor, 8
In the works of later times, Marx and Engels used, instead of the concepts “cost of labor”, “price of labor”, more precise concepts introduced by Marx - “cost of labor power”, “price of labor power” (see the preface to this volume, p. IX ). – 431.
Equal to the costs of its production. Therefore, to the same extent that the unattractiveness of work increases, wages decrease. Moreover, to the same extent that the use of machines and the division of labor increases, the quantity of labor also increases, either due to an increase in the number of working hours, or due to an increase in the amount of labor required in each given period of time, the acceleration of the machines, etc. d.
Modern industry has transformed the small workshop of the patriarchal craftsman into the large factory of the industrial capitalist. The masses of workers crowded into the factory are organized like soldiers. As privates in an industrial army, they are placed under the supervision of a whole hierarchy of non-commissioned officers and officers. They are slaves not only of the bourgeois class, of the bourgeois state, they are enslaved every day and hour by the machine, the overseer and, above all, the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. This despotism is the more petty, the more hateful, the more it embitters, the more openly profit is proclaimed as its goal.
The less skill and strength manual labor requires, that is, the more modern industry develops, the more men's labor is replaced by women's and children's. In relation to the working class, differences of gender and age lose all social significance. There are only working tools that require different costs depending on age and gender.
When the exploitation of the worker by the manufacturer ends and the worker finally receives his wages in cash, other parts of the bourgeoisie pounce on him - the landlord, the shopkeeper, the moneylender, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class: small industrialists, small traders and rentiers, artisans and peasants - all these classes descend into the ranks of the proletariat, partly because their small capital is not enough to run large industrial enterprises and cannot withstand competition with larger capitalists, partly because that their professional skills are being devalued by the introduction of new production methods. This is how the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. His struggle against the bourgeoisie begins with his existence.
First, the struggle is waged by individual workers, then by workers of one factory, then by workers of one branch of labor in one locality against the individual bourgeoisie, who directly exploits them. The workers direct their blows not only against bourgeois relations of production, but also against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy competing foreign goods, smash cars, set fire to factories, and try by force to restore the lost position of the medieval worker.
At this stage, the workers form a mass scattered throughout the country and fragmented by competition. The unity of the working masses is not yet a consequence of their own unification, but only a consequence of the unification of the bourgeoisie, which, in order to achieve its own political goals, must, and for now can, set the entire proletariat in motion. At this stage, the proletarians fight, therefore, not with their enemies, but with the enemies of their enemies - with the remnants of the absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie. The entire historical movement is thus concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory won under such conditions is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; he accumulates in large masses, his strength grows, and he feels it more and more. The interests and living conditions of the proletariat are becoming more and more equal as machines increasingly erase the differences between individual types of labor and reduce wages almost everywhere to the same low level. The increasing competition of the bourgeoisie among themselves and the trade crises it causes lead to the fact that the wages of workers are becoming more and more unstable; The ever faster developing, continuous improvement of machines makes the living situation of the proletarians less and less secure; clashes between the individual worker and the individual bourgeois are increasingly taking on the character of clashes between two classes. Workers start by forming coalitions 9
The English edition of 1888 inserted after the word “coalitions”: “(trade unions).” Ed.
Against the bourgeois; they act together to protect their wages. They even establish permanent associations in order to provide themselves with funds in case of possible clashes. In some places the struggle turns into open uprisings.
Workers win from time to time, but these victories are only temporary. The real result of their struggle is not immediate success, but an increasingly widespread union of workers. It is facilitated by all the growing means of communication created by large industry and establishing connections between workers in different localities. Only this connection is required in order to centralize many local centers of struggle, which have the same character everywhere, and merge them into one national, class struggle. And every class struggle is a political struggle. And the unification, which took centuries for medieval townspeople with their country roads, is achieved by modern proletarians, thanks to railways, within a few years.
This organization of the proletarians into a class, and thereby into a political party, is being destroyed again every minute by the competition between the workers themselves. But it arises again and again, becoming stronger, stronger, more powerful each time. It forces the recognition of the individual interests of workers in legislation, using for this purpose discord between individual layers of the bourgeoisie. For example, the law on a ten-hour working day in England.
In general, clashes within the old society in many respects contribute to the process of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie wages a continuous struggle: first against the aristocracy, later against those parts of the bourgeoisie itself whose interests come into conflict with the progress of industry, and constantly against the bourgeoisie of all foreign countries. In all these battles it is forced to turn to the proletariat, call on it for help and thus involve it in the political movement. It, therefore, itself transmits to the proletariat the elements of its own education, 10
In the English edition of 1888, instead of the words “elements of one’s own education,” it was printed: “elements of one’s own political and general education.” Ed.
That is, a weapon against itself.
Further, as we have seen, the progress of industry pushes entire sections of the ruling class into the ranks of the proletariat, or at least threatens their living conditions. They also bring a large number of educational elements to the proletariat.
Finally, in those periods when the class struggle is approaching its denouement, the process of disintegration within the ruling class, within the entire old society, takes on such a stormy, such a sharp character that a small part of the ruling class renounces it and joins the revolutionary class, the class that belongs to the future. That is why, just as previously part of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now part of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, namely, part of the bourgeois ideologists who have risen to a theoretical understanding of the entire course of the historical movement.
Of all the classes that now oppose the bourgeoisie, only the proletariat represents a truly revolutionary class. All other classes decline and are destroyed with the development of large-scale industry, but the proletariat is its own product.
The middle classes: the small industrialist, the small trader, the artisan and the peasant - they all fight against the bourgeoisie in order to save their existence from destruction like the middle classes. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Even more, they are reactionary: they seek to turn back the wheel of history. If they are revolutionary, then insofar as they are faced with a transition into the ranks of the proletariat, since they defend not their present, but their future interests, since they leave their own point of view in order to take the point of view of the proletariat.
The lumpen proletariat, that passive product of the rotting of the lowest strata of the old society, is in some places drawn into the movement by the proletarian revolution, but due to its entire situation in life it is much more inclined to sell itself for reactionary machinations.
The living conditions of the old society have already been destroyed in the living conditions of the proletariat. The proletarian has no property; his attitude towards his wife and children no longer has anything in common with bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labor, the modern yoke of capital, the same in England and France, both in America and in Germany, have erased from him all national character. Laws, morality, religion - all this for him is nothing more than bourgeois prejudices, behind which bourgeois interests are hidden.
All previous classes, having gained dominance, sought to strengthen their already acquired position in life, subordinating the entire society to the conditions that ensured their method of appropriation. The proletarians can conquer the social productive forces only by destroying their own current method of appropriation, and thereby the entire hitherto existing method of appropriation as a whole. The proletarians have nothing of their own that they need to protect; they must destroy everything that has hitherto protected and ensured private property.
All the movements that have taken place so far have been movements of the minority or were carried out in the interests of the minority. The proletarian movement is an independent movement of the vast majority in the interests of the vast majority. The proletariat, the lowest layer of modern society, cannot rise, cannot straighten up without the entire superstructure towering above it from the layers that form official society being blown up.
If not in content, then in form, the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country, of course, must first put an end to its own bourgeoisie.
In describing the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we have traced the more or less covert civil war within existing society up to the point when it turns into open revolution and the proletariat establishes its rule through the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
All hitherto existing societies were based, as we have seen, on the antagonism between the oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to be able to oppress any class, it is necessary to provide conditions under which it could at least drag out its slave existence. The serf in the state of serfdom rose to the position of a member of the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, rose to the position of bourgeois. On the contrary, the modern worker does not rise with the progress of industry, but sinks increasingly below the conditions of existence of his own class. The worker becomes a pauper, and pauperism grows even faster than population and wealth. This clearly shows that the bourgeoisie is unable to remain the dominant class of society any longer and impose the conditions of existence of its class on the entire society as a regulating law. She is unable to dominate because she is unable to provide her slave with even a slave level of existence, because she is forced to let him sink to a position where she herself must feed him, instead of feeding at his expense. Society can no longer live under her rule, that is, her life is no longer compatible with society.
The main condition for the existence and dominance of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of private individuals, education and increase in capital. The condition for the existence of capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests solely on the competition of workers among themselves. The progress of industry, the involuntary bearer of which is the bourgeoisie, powerless to resist it, replaces the separation of workers by competition with their revolutionary unification through association. Thus, with the development of large-scale industry, the very basis on which it produces and appropriates products is wrested from under the feet of the bourgeoisie. It primarily produces its own gravediggers. Her death and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Refusal of the catechism
In 1847, Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels joined the League of the Just, an offshoot of the secret revolutionary organization the League of Rejected. The “Manifesto” they wrote was a programmatic work created to order. Interestingly, the manifesto was originally supposed to be called “The Project of a Communist Creed.” Engels wrote to Marx: “Think about the Creed.” I think it would be best to discard the catechism form and call this thing the "Communist Manifesto." After all, it will have to cover, to one degree or another, the history of the issue, for which the current form is completely unsuitable." It must be said that the change of name is one of the few merits of Engels.
Women's question
One of the most interesting and witty passages in the Manifesto is Marx’s discussion of the fears of the bourgeoisie that with the advent of communism the socialization of wives will occur. According to Marx, such fears can only be explained by the fact that women are recognized by the bourgeoisie as instruments of production, while communism, on the contrary, wants to free women from such a perception. Marx writes: “Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their workers at their disposal, not to mention official prostitution, find a special pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.” It is noteworthy that Marx himself will have an illegitimate daughter from a maid, whom Engels will have to marry in order to conceal his friend’s affair.
Proletarians, unite!
The maxim “Workers of all countries, unite!” turned out to be incredibly tenacious. The revolution in Russia took place under this slogan. What is interesting, however, is the very concept of the proletariat. It's quite ambiguous. On the one hand, in Ancient Rome this was the name given to poor citizens, declassed elements useful to society only through their offspring. In Dahl’s dictionary, “proletarian” means a peasant, that is, on the contrary, a childless person. In this meaning, “proletarians of all countries, unite!” It sounds strange to say the least.
Ghost of communism
In the original version of the Communist Manifesto there was no “ghostly” introduction by Karl Marx. It appeared only after the final editing by Marx in the fall of 1847. The spectacular opening “A ghost is haunting Europe - the specter of communism” was the idea of Karl Marx. Obviously, this formulation was a consequence of Marx's fascination with mysticism. Karl was born in Trier, a city where ancient ruins alternate with Gothic cathedrals. It is not surprising, therefore, that in his youth he experienced a passion for romanticism. At that time, Edgar Allan Poe was incredibly popular in Europe, so the visible and frightening image of the “ghost of communism” influenced people in the most direct way
Translations
The Communist Manifesto is still one of the most popular and translated works. Even before the October Revolution, many of his translations were published. Among the most exotic are three Japanese translations and one Chinese. The majority were publications in Russian (70) and languages of the Russian Empire (35): 11 in Polish, 7 in Yiddish, 6 in Finnish, 5 in Ukrainian, 4 in Georgian, 2 in Armenian. 55 editions of the Manifesto were published in Germany, and in the Habsburg Empire - 9 in Hungarian and 8 in Czech (of which 3 in Croatia and one each in Slovenia and Slovakia), 34 in English (including in the USA, where the first translation appeared in 1871), 26 in French and 11 in Italian. In addition, 7 editions were published in Bulgarian, 4 in Serbian, 4 in Romanian and one, printed in Thessaloniki, in Sephardic. Northern Europe was moderately represented: 6 publications in Danish, 5 in Swedish and 2 in Norwegian.
Unexpected fame
For almost 25 years the manifesto was not widely known. Nothing foreshadowed his success and future influence on world history. The situation was radically changed by the trial of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, accused of high treason - Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel and Adolf Hepner. In March 1872, the prosecution read the text of the manifesto in the courtroom, which gave the Social Democrats the opportunity to publish it legally, in large quantities, as part of the legal proceedings. It was the edition of 1872 (before that time, changes were made to the document during publications) that became the basis for all subsequent versions of the manifesto.
Religious question
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx deliberately avoids religious issues, devoting the most insignificant place to them. Marx, a convinced atheist and fighter against God, could cross the emotional line in religious discussions. His relationship with God was not only "strained", he was an inveterate atheist and wrote blasphemous poetry. In the party manifesto these “passions” would be excessive. Here is one of his poems in which he compares himself to Lucifer himself.
"Spells of the Desperate"
I have nothing left but revenge
I will raise my throne high,
Its summit will be cold and terrible,
Its basis is superstitious trembling.
Master of Ceremonies! The blackest agony!
Who looks with a healthy eye -
He turns away, deathly pale and numb,
Overtaken by a blind and cold death.
The essay states that the entire previous history of mankind is the history of class struggle. The authors proclaim the inevitability of the death of capitalism at the hands of the proletariat, which will have to build a classless communist society with public ownership of the means of production.
In the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marx and Engels set out their vision of the laws of social development and the inevitability of a change in methods of production. An important place in the “Manifesto” is occupied by a critical review of various non-Marxist theories of socialism and pseudo-socialist teachings. Thus, the utopian “crude and ill-conceived communism” of those who simply extended the principle of private property to everyone (“common private property”) is criticized. In addition, the Manifesto states that the communists, as the most decisive part of the proletariat, “are not a special party opposed to other workers’ parties,” and also “everywhere support every revolutionary movement directed against the existing social and political system” and “seek unification and agreements between democratic parties of all countries."
The manifesto begins with the words: “A ghost is haunting Europe - the ghost of communism. All the forces of old Europe united in the sacred persecution of this ghost: the pope and the tsar, Metternich and Guizot, the French radicals and the German police.” It ends with the following sentences: “Let the ruling classes tremble before the Communist Revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose in it except their chains. They will gain the whole world,” followed by the slogan: “Workers of all countries, unite! "
The first translator of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in Russian, printed at the Kolokol printing house and published in 1869 in Geneva, was Marx and Engels’ comrade-in-arms and opponent in the First International, the prominent anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin. The second edition appeared there in 1882, translated by Georgy Plekhanov with a special preface by Marx and Engels, in which they ask the question whether the Russian community can become an instrument of transition to a communist form of common ownership, bypassing the capitalist stage that Western European societies are going through. The first Ukrainian translation of the “Manifesto” was prepared by the writer Lesya Ukrainka.
There is no exact information about the total number of editions of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. But in the USSR alone, by January 1, 1973, 447 editions of the Manifesto had been published with a total circulation of 24,341,000 copies in 74 languages.
A new surge of interest in the work of Marx and Engels is observed in the 21st century. In 2012, a new English edition of the Manifesto was prepared with a foreword by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Since 2010, Red Quill Books, a Canadian academic publisher specializing in the presentation of classic radical texts in the form of comics or manga, has published The Illustrated Manifesto of the Communist Party ( Communist Manifesto Illustrated) in four parts of the comic.
Soviet postage stamp for the 100th anniversary of the Manifesto, 1948
- Bourgeois and proletarians
- Proletarians and communists
- Socialist and communist literature
- Reactionary socialism
- Feudal socialism
- Petty-bourgeois socialism
- German or "true" socialism
- Conservative or bourgeois socialism
- Critical-utopian socialism and communism
- Reactionary socialism
- The attitude of communists towards various opposition parties
content analysis
The formalization of the Marxist idea was essentially completed by the time it appeared on the world stage in the form of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (January 1848). As for the ideas of history, revolution and communism, the Manifesto does not contain anything new. And yet we need to dwell briefly on its formulations.
The manifesto is a masterpiece of political rhetoric. And a century later, his formulas have lost nothing of their revolutionary pathos and their political effectiveness. In the preamble, the authors determine the level of historical significance of their proclamation: communism is recognized as a force by all European countries; his ghost haunts Europe. The Pope and the Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, the French radicals and the German policemen united in a “holy alliance” to exorcise this specter. Such recognition on the part of the old authorities requires the communists to clarify their views and present them to the public. The new world power opposes the authorities of the old world.
The first chapter of the Manifesto indicates the place of communism in the historical process. “The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggle.” There have always been classes, oppressors and oppressed. However, modern society differs from all previous periods in the simplicity of the picture. “Society is splitting more and more into two large hostile camps, into two large classes facing each other - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.” Seductive in its simplicity, the Manichaean model is established: there are only two forces, good and evil, and everyone who is not on the side of good inevitably ends up on the side of evil. The manifesto follows this model and looks first at the rise of the bourgeoisie and then the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie emerged from the medieval serfs and became the operators of modern industry and commerce that spread across the globe. The bourgeoisie created the modern representative state as its political instrument. “The bourgeoisie played an extremely revolutionary role in history.” The description of this role begins with the following remarks: the bourgeoisie “destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” But this condemnation soon turns into such praise of the achievements of the bourgeoisie as even the most enlightened progressive is not capable of. The bourgeoisie "created wonders of art, but of a completely different kind than the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals." She “made the production and consumption of all countries cosmopolitan,” “she tore the national soil out from under the feet of industry.” “The old local and national isolation and existence on the products of one’s own production are being replaced by comprehensive communication and comprehensive dependence of nations on each other.” In the field of the intellectual bourgeoisie the same revolution was carried out. “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness are becoming more and more impossible, and from the multitude of national and local literatures one world literature is being formed.” Thanks to the development of communications, “even the most barbaric nations” are being drawn into civilization. All nations are forced to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, otherwise they will be destroyed. “In a word, the bourgeoisie creates a world for itself in its own image and likeness.” She created huge cities and “thus snatched a large part of the population from the idiocy of village life.” “She made the countryside dependent on the city, barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on civilized countries, peasant peoples on bourgeois peoples, the East on the West.” “The bourgeoisie, in less than a hundred years of its class rule, has created more numerous and more colossal productive forces than all previous generations combined.” In short, we hear here the voice of Condorcet, with his extraordinary delight at the expected complete destruction of all historical civilizations and the transformation of humanity into a global bourgeois society.
However, the greatness of the bourgeoisie is transitory, like everything in the world, with the exception of communism. The bourgeoisie must go and its achievements will go to the heir who grew up under its rule - the proletariat, that is, “the class of modern workers who can only exist when they find work.” The characterization of the existence of the proletariat contains nothing new. It is interesting, however, to describe the stages of the struggle of the proletariat. “His struggle against the bourgeoisie begins with his existence.” At first there are only individual and local protests against oppression at the local and individual level. With the development of industry, the number of proletarians increases and they begin to realize their situation as a whole. Meetings and associations are organized and local riots begin. Momentary victories are accompanied by defeats, as a result of which national coalitions arise and the proletarian struggle is centralized. The proletariat is embarking on the path of self-organization as a class and a party. The progressive proletarianization of ever larger sections of society brings educated people into the camp of the proletariat. The collapse of the old society encourages small groups from among the ruling class to betray their class and join the revolutionary class, whose future belongs only to itself. “Just as previously part of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now part of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, namely, part of the bourgeois ideologists who have risen to a theoretical understanding of the entire course of the historical movement.” This brings us to Marx and Engels themselves, bourgeois ideologists who are able to explain to the proletariat how the historical process stands and provide intellectual leadership as organizers of the Communist Party.
The second part of the Manifesto examines the relationship between proletarians and communists. Here we find a new set of ideas regarding the role of the communist leadership in the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie. The first phrases are especially important because they set forth the principles that would later develop into the idea of communism as the “universal church” of the proletariat. The chapter begins modestly: “The Communists are not a special party opposed to other workers’ parties.” But in the very next phrase this denial of competition turns into a claim to universalism: “They have no interests separate from the interests of the entire proletariat as a whole.” The conclusions drawn from this are the most far-reaching because this statement does not assert any fact that can be tested for truth or falsity. It is not a program either; it is a fundamental dogma, which declares that the spirit of the proletariat as a whole rests on the Communist Party. Any programmatic aspirations are openly rejected with the following phrase: “They have no interests separate from the interests of the proletariat as a whole.” Communists differ from other proletarian groups not by their principles and program, but by the universal level of their activity. “In the struggle of the proletarians of different nations, they highlight and defend the common interests of the entire proletariat, independent of nationality”; and “at the various stages of development through which the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie passes, they are always representatives of the interests of the movement as a whole.” Over and above the local and temporary features of the struggle of the proletarians, the central leading role of the communists appears. And indeed, the next paragraph formulates the principle of the “avant-garde”: “The communists, therefore, in practice are the most decisive, always encouraging to move forward part of the workers’ parties of all countries, and in theoretical terms they have an advantage over the rest of the mass of the proletariat in understanding the conditions, the course and general results of the proletarian movement." For immediate purposes, the communists, in other respects, do not differ from other proletarian parties. Their goal is “the formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of the rule of the bourgeoisie, the conquest of political power by the proletariat.”
The second chapter offers a detailed exposition and justification of the ultimate goals of communism.
The authors emphasize the non-programmatic nature of these goals. “The theoretical positions of communists are in no way based on ideas, principles invented or discovered by this or that renovator of the world.” “They are only a general expression of the actual relations of the ongoing class struggle, an expression of the historical movement taking place before our eyes.” Therefore, it would be a mistake to consider the statements of the communists as demands for one or another change in the current state of affairs. On the contrary, they reveal the actual state of affairs and propose to develop to their full realization those tendencies that are already inherent in the historical process. Therefore, the accusations brought against the communists are unfounded. Opponents accuse the Communists of intending to abolish private property. The Manifesto acknowledges that this is the essence of communist theory. But what does this abolition mean when all socially significant property is capitalist property, and a huge part of the people already have no property? And if we take property away from those who own it, would that be expropriation? No, since “capital is a collective product and can only be set in motion by the joint activity of many members of society, and ultimately only by the joint activity of all members of society. So, capital is not a personal, but a social force,” and to be a capitalist “means to occupy not a purely personal, but a social position in production.” “Consequently, if capital is transformed into collective property belonging to all members of society, then this will not be the transformation of personal property into public property. Only the social nature of property will change. It will lose its class character.” The so-called “expropriation”, therefore, only transforms the existing situation into a principle of social order. The same type of evidence is then applied to charges of abolition of bourgeois marriage, nationality, religion and “eternal truths such as freedom, justice,” etc.
Together with communist theses, history invades human consciousness. These communist statements are not a program for intervention in the existing order, they are an insight into an emerging order growing within the disintegrating old social order. Communists and their followers therefore feel themselves to be executors of the law of history. And again we must point out the motives from Condorcet in this concept of the communists - the leaders of humanity in its march to the kingdom of freedom. (Once again it must be recalled that there is no contradiction between enlightened progressivism and communism). And yet history cannot march all the time on its own; leaders must help it. The instrument to achieve the goal already exists: the proletarians as a class that does not belong to society, without property and without nationality (“Workers have no fatherland”). This material must be given form by awakening its class consciousness, and then a revolution can be made.
Gaining power will be a long process. Between the bourgeois state and the free society there will be a transitional period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the first stage, the proletariat will become the ruling class in a democratic society. This political power will then be used “to wrest from the bourgeoisie, step by step, all capital, to centralize all the instruments of production in the hands of the state, that is, the proletariat, organized as the ruling class, and to increase as quickly as possible the sum of the productive forces.” This can be achieved “only through despotic interference in property rights and bourgeois relations of production.” These measures may not seem justified from an economic point of view, but they are inevitable on the path to a revolutionary transformation of the entire mode of production. In the process of this development, class distinctions will disappear, production will be concentrated in the hands of an association of individuals, and public power will lose its political character, since it will no longer be an instrument of class. And finally, the old society will be replaced by “an association in which the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all.” The manifesto ends with the famous call for the unification of revolutionaries: “The proletarians have nothing to lose in it except their chains. They will gain the whole world. Workers of all countries, unite!” .
Program for the transition from capitalism to communism
In chapter “II. Proletarians and Communists" provides a brief program for the transition from a capitalist social formation to a communist one, carried out by force by the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The proletariat uses its political dominance in order to wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie step by step, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, that is, the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase the sum of the productive forces as quickly as possible. This can, of course, happen at first only with the help of despotic intervention in the right of property and in bourgeois relations of production, that is, with the help of measures that seem economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of the movement outgrow themselves and are inevitable as a means of revolutionizing everything. production method.
The program itself contains 10 points:
These arrangements will, of course, vary from country to country.
However, in the most advanced countries the following measures can be applied almost universally:
- Expropriation of land property and conversion of land rent to cover government expenses.
- High progressive tax.
- Cancellation of the right of inheritance.
- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
- Centralization of credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
- Centralization of all transport in the hands of the state.
- Increasing the number of state factories, production tools, clearing for arable land and improving land according to a general plan.
- Equal compulsory labor for everyone, the establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
- Connecting agriculture with industry, promoting the gradual elimination of the distinction between city and countryside.
- Public and free education of all children. Elimination of factory labor of children in its modern form. Connecting education with material production, etc.
After the liquidation of capitalist relations, the dictatorship of the proletariat will exhaust itself and will have to give way to an “association of individuals.” The essence of this association, the principles of its organization and functioning are not defined in the Manifesto.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions disappear and all production is concentrated in the hands of associations of individuals, then public power will lose its political character. Political power in the proper sense of the word is the organized violence of one class to suppress another. If the proletariat, in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, inevitably unites into a class, if through revolution it transforms itself into the ruling class and, as the ruling class, by force abolishes the old relations of production, then together with these relations of production it destroys the conditions for the existence of class opposition, destroys classes in general, and thereby itself and its own dominance as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class oppositions comes an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
assessments
The Manifesto of the Communist Party had a huge influence on the minds of thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; it is the basic document for the programs of communist parties in all countries.
The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital are two of the most important publications of the 19th century and are still highly influential today.
translations into Russian
sources
- Bagaturia G. A.“Manifesto of the Communist Party” // Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary / Ch. editor: L. F. Ilyichev, P. N. Fedoseev, S. M. Kovalev, V. G. Panov. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1983. - P. 337-339. - 840 s. - 150,000 copies.
- Voegelin, Eric. From Enlightenment to Revolution / Ed. John H. Hallowell. - Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1975. - 307 p. - ISBN 0-8223-0326-4.
In February 1848, the Manifesto of the Communist Party was published. This was the first program and at the same time a militant appeal of an international organization based on the principles of scientific communism. As V.I. wrote Lenin, this small book is worth entire volumes: “in its spirit the entire organized and fighting proletariat of the civilized world lives and moves to this day.”
A ghost wandered across Europe
LET'S read again the poetic, heartfelt, dignified and confident alarm lines of the Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: “A ghost is haunting Europe - the ghost of communism. All the forces of old Europe united in the sacred persecution of this ghost: the pope and the tsar, Metternich and Guizot, the French radicals and the German police.”
Yes, in 1848 there were very few people in Europe, only a few hundred people who had risen to realize the historical role of the proletariat. They had to work underground, gathering furtively, in small groups. Yes, only a few voices in 1848 responded to the call “Workers of all countries, unite!” But, as F. Engels wrote in the preface to the German edition of the Manifesto in 1890, “at present it (the Manifesto - A.P.) is undoubtedly the most widespread, the most international work of all socialist literature, the general program of many millions of workers in all countries from Siberia to California.”
A hundred years have passed. In the 90s of the last century, I came across many articles, brochures, books that presented communism as some kind of historical accident, an amok (attack of madness), which, thank God, ended.
Another twenty-five years passed. It turned out: communism is alive! It is not even a ghost, but an influential ideology and political movement.
Over the 167 years that have passed since the publication of the Manifesto, a significant number of people have increased who have united in the “sacred persecution” of the communist movement. Following the pope (then it was Pius IX), the tsar (Nicholas I), Bismarck, the author of the “exceptional law” against socialists, and Hitler, the most aggressive hater of the humanistic ideology of communism and a bloodthirsty theorist and practitioner of anti-communism, the liberal Churchill and fascist Mussolini. Then this “sacred mission” was gladly accepted by American presidents - from Truman to Obama.
Well, in Russia, the great-grandson of Nicholas I, Nicholas II, earned himself fame on the fields of the war against the communist idea. A hundred years later, in the 90s of the 20th century, the changeling Yeltsin and the whole pack of decommunizers, de-Stalinizers, etc., who succeeded him, showed themselves here.
With hope for the working class
Now let’s trace the fate of the social ideas and forecasts set out in the Manifesto.
“The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggle,” wrote Marx and Engels. Actually, it was not they who discovered the class struggle. Plato also noted that in any state “there are always two states hostile to each other: one is the state of the poor, the other is the rich.” And a number of French historians of the Restoration period (1815 - 1830) considered the class struggle to be the key to understanding the entire history of France.
The discovery of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels consists primarily in substantiating the world-historical role of the working class. The Manifesto shows the history of the development and struggle of the proletariat since the formation of bourgeois society. I emphasize: not only development, but also struggle. After all, many thinkers and writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries showed the working class as suffering and oppressed, but almost no one as struggling. In reality, the proletariat goes through various stages of development. “His struggle against the bourgeoisie begins with his existence.”
One of the first organized forms of workers' struggle against exploitation was the Luddite movement in England. The Luddites destroyed machines and factory buildings, believing that technology was the cause of their misfortunes, including unemployment and hunger. However, some of the Luddites believed that by destroying machines, they were striking a blow at the property of the capitalists, and therefore hoped to force the manufacturers to make concessions.
The workers created secret organizations and nominated leaders from their ranks. One of these leaders of the resistance of the English workers, Medzherson, is shown in the book of Soviet writers R. Shtilmark and
V. Vasilevsky “The Heir from Calcutta.” This is how he characterized himself:
“I am fifty years old, and twenty of them I gave to the fight for truth. They still remember me in Lancashire. There the poor people did me an honor: I was elected to the first strike committee fourteen years ago. For this I was sentenced to death, but the workers attacked the police cart and snatched us, five convicts, from the hands of the executioners. Then I moved to Spitfield, near London. For almost ten years we fought there for our rights... Soldiers shot at us - we did not give up. Many were captured and hanged..."
The English Parliament passed a law introducing the death penalty for damaging cars. What kind of humanists these liberals are!
The Luddite movement was mercilessly suppressed by troops. But the struggle of the working class continued. In France and Germany it took the form of armed uprisings. Lyon uprising of 1831. Then the Lyon Uprising of 1834, when workers for the first time put forward not only economic demands - higher wages - but also political demands. For the first time in history they performed under the red banner. And finally, the June workers' uprising in Paris in 1848, four months after the publication of the Manifesto. These uprisings showed that the proletariat in Europe declared itself as an independent political force.
The working class, Marx and Engels argued, is capable of not only independent struggle for its interests within the framework of bourgeois society. He must become the “gravedigger” of this society. The historical task of the proletariat: replacing the capitalist system with a socialist one through revolution. “Of all the classes that now oppose the bourgeoisie,” wrote the authors of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” “only the proletariat represents a truly revolutionary class... The proletarian has no property: his attitude towards his wife and children no longer has anything in common with bourgeois family relations ; modern industrial labor, the modern yoke of capital, the same in England and France, both in America and in Germany, have erased from him all national character. Laws, morality, religion - all this for him is nothing more than bourgeois prejudices, behind which bourgeois interests are hidden.”
Property is the master key to all problems
Now let's move on to the main thing. How did the working class and its leading representatives - the communists - feel about property, family, and fatherland then, at the time the Manifesto was written? How do we, communists of the 21st century, resolve these issues?
Let's start with property relations. We read in the Manifesto: “Communists can express their theory in one proposition: the destruction of private property.” The authors of the first communist program propose specific measures for this. They emphasize: “The proletariat uses its political dominance to wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state... This can, of course, happen first only through despotic intervention in property rights and in bourgeois relations of production...”
It is noteworthy that when Marx and Engels outline ten specific measures that the proletariat of the advanced countries will take after coming to power, seven of them concern property relations:
1. Expropriation of land property and conversion of land rent to cover government expenses.
2. High progressive tax.
3. Cancellation of the right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of all transport in the hands of the state.
7. Increase in the number of state-owned factories.
Some may find point 3 strange: abolition of the right of inheritance. But back in the 17th century, it was preached in the theory of “labor property” by the founder of liberalism, John Locke. Proclaiming property inviolable and sacred, he assured that the bourgeois has the right only to that property that he himself created through the labor of his hands and head. Marx and Engels really relied on all the wealth of previous social thought of mankind.
The measures proposed by Marx and Engels, promoting a radical change in property relations, were continued and developed in the work of V.I. Lenin’s “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Deal with It,” and then were largely repeated in the Anti-Crisis Program of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
Our cause is just, victory will be ours
The Manifesto of the Communist Party began with sublimely poetic lines.
According to the fair remark of F. Mehring, “Marx could compete with the best masters of German literature in the strength and imagery of his language.” It ends with no less force:
“Communists consider it a despicable thing to hide their intentions. They openly declare that their goals can be achieved through the violent overthrow of the entire existing social order. Let the ruling classes tremble before the Communist Revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose in it except their chains. They will gain the whole world.
Workers of all countries, unite!”
And then I hear the reader’s voice: where is this communist revolution of yours? I answer: the one that Marx and Engels wrote about in the Manifesto in 1848 began 70 years later. In 1917 in Russia. And the ruling classes of all bourgeois countries really shuddered before it, not to mention the ruling classes of the bourgeois-landowner Russian Empire.
Why did the Great October Socialist Revolution win? Its success was determined primarily by the fact that the preconditions for it were ripe in Russia: economic, class and political contradictions had become extremely acute. It makes sense to add psychological prerequisites to them. In the conditions of the world war, when millions of soldiers were killed and maimed at the front, tens of millions of workers suffered from hunger and deprivation in the rear, when the poverty of the masses assumed terrifying proportions, the workers and peasants had the feeling that they had nothing to lose except their chains. It increased the strength of the people tenfold and helped them win in 1917.
After 73 years, the counter-revolution won in Russia. How long?
As a result of the bourgeois counter-revolution and the restoration of capitalism, the country found itself in the hands of private individuals - firstly, oligarch tycoons, whose names are well known, and secondly, smaller owners, such as the owners of the Dmitrovsky Knitwear enterprise, where I work.
The working class of the Soviet Union has once again become the proletariat of bourgeois Russia, exploited by the capitalists. It doesn’t matter that a worker may own an apartment, a dacha, or a car. In order to have a livelihood and pay, say, property taxes, he is forced to sell his labor. In production, each of us falls into a petty and often humiliating dependence on the owner and his representatives - the director, etc. The workers at my enterprise say: “We are slaves.” Exploitation of workers is growing due to the fact that staff are being reduced and the responsibilities of those laid off are distributed among those remaining. An increase in labor intensity does not lead to any increase in wages. All this serves one thing: the profit of the rich, those 10% of the population who own 80% of the national wealth.
Program for the modern proletariat
It feels like the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was written by Marx and Engels about modern Russia. Read here:
“When the exploitation of the worker by the manufacturer ends and the worker finally receives his wages in cash, other parts of the bourgeoisie pounce on him - the landlord, the shopkeeper, the money lender, etc.”
Nowadays, the same homeowner “pounces” on the worker (payment for housing and communal services, major repairs, etc.). And along with it, trading networks, banks and, alas, medical institutions, which also became part of the bourgeois system, etc. and so on. We, the workers, were deprived of public property, we were deprived of social guarantees, we were deprived of the respect that working people enjoyed in Soviet times. I, like the people around me, have the feeling that we really have nothing to lose, that the country, and we together with it, is going to a dead end.
It is not true that the proletariat is absolutely passive. Foci of resistance are appearing more and more often, Pravda constantly writes about them.
Let us remember the words of the “Manifesto”:
“First, the struggle is waged by individual workers, then by workers of one factory, then by workers of one branch of labor in one locality against the individual bourgeois...”
We recently had workers in one industry rise up - truck drivers. Against one bourgeois - Rotenberg. And soon this protest went beyond the fight against one capitalist.
The “Manifesto” was enthusiastically received by the then small vanguard of scientific socialism. Moreover, with the defeat of the Parisian workers' uprising in 1848, he faded into the background.
After the reaction caused by the defeat of the European revolution of 1848, the rise of the labor movement began in the 1860s, culminating in the creation of the First International in 1864. Then the defeat of the heroic Paris Commune in 1871 and again the onset of reaction. Dissolution of the First International in 1876.
The rise of the labor movement and the creation of mass social democratic parties in European countries in the last third of the 19th century. Creation of the Second International (1889). On the eve of the First World War, the International had become an impressive force. And - the collapse of the Second International due to the betrayal of its leadership (1914).
The socialist revolution in Russia in 1917, the building of socialism in the USSR, Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the creation of a world system of socialism, the development of the international communist movement - and the disaster of the 1990s.
What do we see? Following defeats, sometimes very serious, catastrophic, there is an inevitable rise in the influence of the ideas of the Manifesto, the rise of the labor movement.
What are the tasks of communists now in implementing the ideas of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party”?
I think we must first ensure that the demands of truckers are met. It is necessary to lead the struggle of the proletariat and, as stated in the Manifesto, “put an end to your own bourgeoisie.”
Let the ruling classes tremble before the coming communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose in it except their chains. They will gain the whole world. And I won't settle for anything less.
Workers of all countries, unite!
1. Formally, the document that became the “holy scripture” of communists around the world was created Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels not on their own initiative, but on behalf of the radical left-wing “Union of the Just,” of which both politicians became members in 1847. It is interesting that after the entry of Marx and Engels, the “Union of the Just” was renamed the “Union of Communists”.
2. The Congress of the League of the Just commissioned its new member, Friedrich Engels, to create the text of a policy document called the “Draft of the Communist Creed.” But, apparently, the atheistic beliefs of Marx and Engels forced them to change the name of the final document to “Manifesto of the Communist Party.”
Painting "Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels". Artist G. Gordon. Canvas, oil. Reproduction. Photo: RIA Novosti
3. Officially, the authorship of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” belongs to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but in fact it was written in Brussels, in January 1848, only by Marx. Engels made only a few comments, but Marx insisted that the two names of the authors be indicated on the publication.
4. Researchers note that, unlike many other programmatic political documents, the Manifesto of the Communist Party is as easy to read as a work of fiction. Karl Marx had remarkable journalistic talent, which was evident when writing this document - the “Manifesto,” which determined the history of human development for an entire century, fit into just 12,000 words.
5. The Manifesto of the Communist Party was first published in German in London in 1848. There are discrepancies with the date of its publication - different sources indicate February 15, February 21, February 26, and also July 4. It is possible that the confusion is due to the fact that the Manifesto was published in different languages - in addition to German, in Swedish, and somewhat later in English.
6. The Manifesto of the Communist Party was written in 1848, when a number of revolutions took place in European countries. However, practically no one paid attention to the ideas of Marx and Engels - the number of their supporters did not exceed several dozen people. The ideas set out in the Manifesto would gain true popularity only a few decades later.
7. The first edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in Russian was published in 1869 in Geneva. The authorship of the translation is attributed to a prominent anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. The second edition appeared in 1882 in translation Georgy Plekhanov. It is curious that the political views of both Bakunin and Plekhanov were sharply criticized by the main successor of the ideas of the Manifesto in Russia - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
8. There is no exact information about the number of editions of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In the USSR alone, as of January 1, 1973, 447 editions of the Manifesto were published with a total circulation of 24,341,000 copies in 74 languages. The total number of publications in the world exceeds 1000 in more than 100 languages.
Title page of the Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1885. Reproduction. The original is kept in the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Museum. Photo: RIA Novosti
9. 100 years later, in 1948, another “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was published in the USSR - this was the name of the poem by the famous Soviet poet Sergei Narovchatov. In particular, it contained the following lines:
For a hundred years in a row you have been repeating about him,
And, old, he rises again as news
Everywhere where you won't find fire during the day
A lost conscience in the darkness...
And the White House is powerless before him,
The White House that stopped being white
Ever since the tenants in it
Our white light is being sullied with black deeds.
Fear of hundreds of the wrathful power of the masses
Introduced into law by the twentieth century,
I wish I could see old Marx,
How we are now raging on the planet!
10. The creator of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Karl Marx, as already noted, was a talented journalist who knew how to attract the attention of readers with bright and rich phrases at the beginning and end of the work. That is why even those who have never read the “Manifesto” have heard them at least once in their lives - “A ghost is haunting Europe, the ghost of communism” and “Workers of all countries, unite!”