Manifesto of the Communist Party
A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have
entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in
power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism,
against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a
power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world,
publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the
Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the
following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish
languages

The history of all hitherto existing society†
is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡
and journeyman, in a
word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society
into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians,
knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,
apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done
away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,
new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

*
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of
wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are
reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
†
That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded
history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in
Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history,
and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from
India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by
Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With
the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic
classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second
edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]
‡
Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]
15 Manifesto of the Communist Party
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.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these
burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising
bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the
colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce,
to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds,
now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system
took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class;
division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour
in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer
sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by
industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the
way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to
communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry;
and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion
the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class
handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of
development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political
advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and
self-governing association in the medieval commune*
: here independent urban republic (as in
Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the
period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the
bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market,
conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive
of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal,
idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his
“natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest,
than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious

*
This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or
conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition] “Commune”
was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters
local self-government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economical development of
the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888
English Edition]
16 Manifesto of the Communist Party
fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In
one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with
reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science,
into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family
relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle
Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful
indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished
wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the
proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the
national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the
front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the
various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie 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 proletariat the
advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general
results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties:
formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of
political power by the proletariat.
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 merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle,
from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property
relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent
upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the
abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most
complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class
antagonisms, 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 reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally
acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the
groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of
the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to
abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still
destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that
kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of
begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is
23 Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists
based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this
antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital
is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort,
only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, 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-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of
subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer.
What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to
prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal
appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and
reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of
others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under
which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the
interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist
society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the
labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present
dominates the past. In bourgeois 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 bourgeois, abolition of individuality and
freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and
bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois 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 bourgeois about freedom in general,
have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered
traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of
buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society,
private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the
few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us,
therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose
existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is
just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a
social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can
no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say,
individuality vanishes.
24 Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois,
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 appropriate the products of society; all that it does
is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal
laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer
idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do
not work. The whole of

1. Reactionary Socialism
A. Feudal Socialism
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and
England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July
1830, and in the English reform agitation4
, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful
upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary
battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration
period had become impossible.*

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own
interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited
working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new
masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half
menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie
to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend
the march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a
banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats
of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited this spectacle.
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the
feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different
and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never
existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of
society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief
accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois régime a class is being
developed which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates
a revolutionary proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in
ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped
from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar,
and potato spirits.†

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with
Feudal Socialism.

*
Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830). [Note by Engels to the English
edition of 1888.]
†
This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates
cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers
of potato spirits. The wealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for
declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock companies. [Note by Engels to the
English edition of 1888.]
29 Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity
declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the
place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and
Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the
heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only
class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois
society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the
modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and
commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty
bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing
itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class,
however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and,
as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely
disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures,
agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was
natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their
criticism of the bourgeois régime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the
standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus
arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but
also in England.
This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of
modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved,
incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of
capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the
petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying
inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the
dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of
production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to
cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old
property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case,
it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception,
this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues.
C. German or “True” Socialism
The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure
of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was
introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its
contest with feudal absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seized
on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into
Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German
30 Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature
social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed a
purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the demands
of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of “Practical Reason” in
general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their
eyes, the laws of pure Will, of Will

Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class parties,
such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the
momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent
and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the SocialDemocrats*
against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take
up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great
Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists
of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical
bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for
national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the
absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible
recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the
German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social
and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy,
and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the
bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a
bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European
civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the
seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in
Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
In short, the 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 labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all
countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal 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 proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!5

*
The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc, in the daily
press by the Réforme. The name of Social-Democracy signifies, with these its inventors, a section of
the Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with socialism. [Engels, English Edition
1888]