MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY:
(This is a fragment; you have the full text HERE)
"PREAMBLE:
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to
exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals
and German police-spies. (…)
Chapter I. Bourgeois
and Proletarians
The history of all hitherto existing
society (2) is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and
plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor
and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either
in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of
the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we
find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various
orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have
patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords,
vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these
classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that
has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class
antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,
new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the
bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class
antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great
hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie
and Proletariat (…)
Modern industry has established the world
market (…)
The need of a constantly expanding
market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the
globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions
everywhere. (…)
Modern Industry has converted the
little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the
industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are
organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed
under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only
are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are
daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by
the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism
proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the
more embittering it is."
Marxism, Freedom and the State
I am a passionate seeker after Truth
and a not less passionate enemy of the malignant fictions used by the “Party of
Order”, the official representatives of all turpitudes, religious,
metaphysical, political, judicial, economic, and social, present and past, to brutalise
and enslave the world; I am a fanatical lover of Liberty; considering it as the
only medium in which can develop intelligence, dignity, and the happiness of
man; not official “Liberty”, licensed, measured and regulated by the State, a
falsehood representing the privileges of a few resting on the slavery of
everybody else; not the individual liberty, selfish, mean, and fictitious
advanced by the school of Rousseau and all other schools of bourgeois
Liberalism, which considers the rights of the individual as limited by the
rights of the State, and therefore necessarily results in the reduction of the
rights of the individual to zero.
I am a convinced upholder of
economic and social equality, because I know that, without that equality,
liberty, justice, human dignity, morality, and the well-being of individuals as
well as the prosperity of nations will never be anything else than so many
lies. But as upholder in all circumstances of liberty, that first condition of
humanity, I think that liberty must establish itself in the world by the
spontaneous organisation of labour and of collective ownership by productive
associations freely organised and federalised in districts, and by the equally
spontaneous federation of districts, but not by the supreme and tutelary action
of the State.
There is the point which principally
divides the Revolutionary Socialists or Collectivists from the Authoritarian
Communists, who are upholders of the absolute initiative of the State. Their
goal is the same; each party desires equally the creation of a new social order
founded only on the organisation of collective labour, inevitably imposed on
each and everyone by the very force of things, equal economic conditions for
all, and the collective appropriation of the instruments of labour. Only the
Communists imagine that they will be able to get there by the development and
organisation of the political power of the working-classes, and principally of
the proletariat of the towns, by the help of the bourgeois Radicalism, whilst
the Revolutionary Socialists, enemies of all equivocal combinations and
alliances, think on the contrary that they cannot reach this goal except by the
development and organisation, not of the political but of the social and
consequently anti-political power of the working masses of town and country
alike, including all favourably disposed persons of the upper classes, who,
breaking completely with their past, would be willing to join them and fully
accept their programme. (…)
Hence, two different methods. The
Communists believe they must organise the workers’ forces to take possession of
the political power of the State. The Revolutionary Socialists organise with a
view to the destruction, or if you prefer a politer word, the liquidation of
the State. The Communists are the upholders of the principle and practice of,
authority, the Revolutionary Socialists have confidence only in liberty. Both
equally supporters of that science which must kill superstition and replace
faith, the former would wish to impose it; the latter will exert themselves to
propagate it so that groups of human beings, convinced, will organise
themselves and will federate spontaneously, freely, from below upwards, by
their own movement and conformably to their real interests, but never after a plan
traced in advance and imposed on the “ignorant masses” by some superior
intellects.
