The history of every society that has existed up to now is the history of class struggles.
Oppressed and oppressors have been in constant opposition to each other, waging a relentless struggle that has ended each time in a revolutionary transformation of the whole of society or in the common decline of the struggling classes.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, is distinguished by the fact that it has simplified class oppositions. The whole society is split into two great classes that face each other directly: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie has played an extremely revolutionary role in history.
It has destroyed feudal relations and has left no other bond between man and man than bare self-interest, the "cash payment" devoid of feelings. It has dissolved personal dignity in exchange-value and in its place has put only the freedom of unscrupulous trade. It tore the sentimental veil from the family relationship and brought it to a pure relationship of money.
Since the birth of large-scale industry and the world market, it has agglomerated the population, centralized the means of production and concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this has been political centralization: provinces with different interests, laws, governments, and tariffs have been forced together into one nation. The bourgeoisie finally conquered exclusive political dominance in the modern representative state.
Modern state power is only a committee which administers the common affairs of billionaires and millionaires, the leaders of whole armies of workers, the members of the modern bourgeois class.
The state is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful class, economically and consequently also politically dominant. It is the instrument of the exploiting class to force the exploited class into the conditions of oppression given by the existing mode of production. The modern representative state is the instrument for the exploitation of wage labor by capital.
In the same measure as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, develops, so does the proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who live only as long as they find work and who find work only as long as their labor increases capital. The labor-power of these laborers is a commodity like any other article of commerce, and in the same way their wages are exposed to all market fluctuations.
For the working class, differences of sex and age no longer have any directly social validity. There are only work tools that have different costs depending on age and gender.
The interests and living conditions within the proletariat are becoming more and more equal as machinery erases the differences in labor and sinks wages almost everywhere to the same low level. The workers thus begin to form coalitions against the bourgeoisie to defend their wages. The real result of their struggles is not immediate success, but the ever-widening union of the workers: the centralization of the many local struggles into a national struggle, into a class struggle.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, therefore the relations of production, and therefore all social relations. The incessant disorder of all social conditions distinguishes the epoch of the bourgeoisie from all others.
The small middle classes that have existed up to now are falling into the proletariat because their small capital is not enough to compete with the larger capitalists and because their ability is being devalued by the new modes of production.
To the extent that the exploitation of one individual by another is abolished, the exploitation of one nation by another is abolished. With the opposition of the classes within the nation, the hostile position of the nations among themselves disappears.
Of all the classes that today confront the bourgeoisie, only the proletariat is a truly revolutionary class.
All the classes of the past who seized power sought to safeguard the position they had already acquired in life by subjecting the whole society to the conditions of their mode of earning. The proletarians can take possession of the productive forces only by abolishing the entire mode of appropriation hitherto in force. The proletarians have nothing of their own to safeguard, they have to destroy all private security and all private welfare that has existed up to now.
The communists differ from other proletarian parties in that they emphasize and assert the common interests, independent of nationality, of the whole proletariat.
The immediate goal of communists is the formation of the proletariat as a class-conscious class and the conquest of the political power of the proletariat.
What distinguishes communism is the abolition of bourgeois property, which is based on the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie.
We communists have been reproached with wanting to abolish the property that is the result of someone's own labor; we do not need to abolish it, the development of industry has already abolished it and abolishes it every day. In bourgeois society, private property exists precisely because it does not exist for nine-tenths of its members. Wage labor does not create property for the proletarian: it creates capital, i.e., the property which exploits wage labor.
It has also been objected that with the abolition of private property a general laziness would take hold. If this were the case, bourgeois society should have long since been ruined because here those who work do not earn and those who earn do not work.
The wage is the sum of the means of subsistence that are necessary to keep the worker alive as a worker. We want to eliminate the miserable character of social relations dictated by wage labor where the worker lives only as long as the interest of the ruling class demands.
In bourgeois society, labor is only a means of increasing capital. In communist society, capital is only a means to expand, enrich and promote the life process of the worker. In bourgeois society, capital is independent and personal while the active individual is dependent and impersonal.
Communism does not deprive anyone of the power to appropriate social products, it only takes away the power to subjugate the labor of others through this appropriation.
In place of the old bourgeois society with its class opposition there will be an association where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
The dominant ideas of an epoch have always been only the ideas of the ruling class.
Bourgeois ideas are the results of bourgeois relations of production and property, just as bourgeois law is only the will of the bourgeois class elevated to law.
The bourgeoisie believe, like all the waning ruling classes, that their relations of production and property are like eternal laws of nature and reason.
The dissolution of old ideas goes hand in hand with the dissolution of the old conditions of life. The communist revolution is the most radical break with traditional property relations: no wonder if in the course of its development it breaks most radically with traditional ideas.
Communists refuse to keep their opinions and intentions secret. They openly declare that their goals can only be achieved by the violent overthrow of every social order that has existed up to now.
Let the ruling classes tremble in the face of a communist revolution!
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, and they have a world to win.
Proletarians and oppressed of all countries, unite!