The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is one of the most famous essays in history. Like Marx and Engels’ other work, it discusses the power imbalance between the capital owning class, such as landlords and corporate employers, and the working class, whose labor they exploit for rents and profits. Individual workers have little power against capital owners, who would merely replace them with another worker desperate for sustenance enough to accept exploitation. The Communist movement called for the working class to unite and use their power as the majority to bring about a Communist society. It was first published in 1848 and is pretty long, so this is a lightly edited simple modern English version of the second section, with the very last few paragraphs of the whole text at the end. The first section is here. I didn’t include most of the third and fourth sections about Communist literature and the relationship of the Communists to other parties.

II. The Working Class and Communists

In what relation do the Communists stand to the working class as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party against to other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the working class as a whole.

They do not set up any group-based principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the working class movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by only these things: (1) In the national struggles of the working class of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the shared interests of entire working class, not related to nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the capital owners has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the working class the advantage of clearly understanding the situation.

The immediate goal of the Communism is the same as that of all the other working class parties: formation of the working class into a class, overthrow of the capitalist rule, conquest of political power by the working class.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They simply express, in general terms, actual relationships springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. Getting rid of existing property concepts is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.

All property relations in the past have always been changed as a result of change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, got rid of feudal property in favor of capitalist property.

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the getting rid of property in general, but the getting rid of capitalist property. But modern capitalist private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and deciding ownership products; that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been criticized wanting to abolish the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is said to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the minor artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that came before the capitalist form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has mostly already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean modern capitalist private property?

But does wage-labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e. that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except by creating a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its current form, is based on capital and wage-labor being enemies. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal, but also a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members can it be set in motion.

Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power. Owning capital gives you the social power to control workers.

So when capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.

Let us now take wage-labor.

The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i.e., the means of subsistence, which is absolutely required in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage-laborer manages to get through his labor is just enough to keep going and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal share of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus to use to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable nature of this, where the laborer lives just to increase capital for the wealthy capitalists, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In capitalist society, living labor is nothing but a way to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society, accumulated labor is a way to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.

In capitalist society, those with power in the past dominate the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In capitalist society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the capitalist, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of capitalist individuality, capitalist independence, and capitalist freedom is undoubtedly aimed for.

By freedom is meant, under the present capitalist conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our capital owners about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the restricted traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the capitalist conditions of production, and of the capital owners itself.

You are horrified at our intending get rid of private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for 90 percent of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of that 90 percent. You criticize us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property that only exists because the immense majority of society cannot have it.

Simply put, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Yes, that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, so from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into capitalist property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the capitalist, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to gain a share of the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to control the labor of others using what they own.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, capitalist society should long ago have been destroyed through idleness. Those of its members who work make nothing, and those who make the wealth do not work. The whole of this objection is just another expression of the obvious statement: that there can no longer be any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and sharing material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and sharing intellectual products. Just as, to the capitalist, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

It makes no sense to respond to our intended abolition of capitalist property, with your capitalist notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your ideas are just the outgrowth of the conditions of your capitalist production and capitalist property, just as your wisdom is but the will of your class made into a law for all. The essential character and direction of what we consider wisdom or the way things are, is determined by the economic conditions of existence of your wealthy class.

It is a selfish delusion to think that the social and cultural forms that come from our capitalist economic system and the capital-labor power relationships in that system, which is just one of many economic systems that have existed in history from feudalism to the present. This selfish delusion is something you share with every ruling class that has come before you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own capitalist form of property.

Abolition of the modern view of family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most sacred of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by what we teach in schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented education being used for the purposes of society. They only want to change the nature of the values taught to children by the education system, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The capitalist clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting when, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the working class are torn asunder. The poor do not get to have the comfortable family unit that the middle-class and wealthy do. Their social relationships with their family are warped by how their labor and time is controlled by the capitalists. To survive in these families, even the children have to be thought of as means to make money in present or future.

But you Communists would introduce a community of women, screams the whole capital owners in chorus.

The capitalist sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common. So he believes that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He does not suspect that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

Nothing is more ridiculous than the self-righteous anger of our capitalists at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from since before we can remember.

The capitalists use their own wives and daughters for labor. They use the wives and daughters of the working class for their labor. Communists want an openly legalized community of women that will not be exploited for the use of capitalists. Women will no longer have to follow the whims of the capitalists to survive.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the working class must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the capitalist sense of the word.

National differences and conflict between peoples are daily more and more vanishing. The supremacy of the working class will cause them to vanish even faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the freedom of the working class.

As we end the exploitation of individuals by others, we will also end the exploitation of countries by other countries. As conflict between classes in a nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep understanding to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its nature as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have always been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they only express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolving of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

One fact is common to all past ages: the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all of its variety, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class struggle.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But enough with the capitalist objections to Communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the working class to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy.

The working class will use its political supremacy to take control, by degrees, of all capital from the capital owners, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the working class organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be done except by force, as the ruling class will resist change.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equal distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.

Political power, properly so called, is just the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the working class during its contest with the capital owners is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class.

In place of the old capitalist society, with its classes and class struggle, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

The relationship of the Communists with other working-class parties

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, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

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

The Communists don’t want to hide 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 Communistic revolution. The working class have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!