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I WANNT GIMME

The Communist Manifesto
(February 1848)
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.
I. Bourgeois and Proletarians
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. 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
bourgeois; 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 revolutionized industrial production. The place of
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial bourgeois 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
self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of
religious 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 aqueducts, and Gothic
cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and
crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,
and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first
condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and
his relations with his kind.
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 connections
everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character
to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established
national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new
industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by
industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the
remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter
of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old
local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction,
universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The
intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness
and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national
and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

Do you want the rest?

Ok

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely
facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into
civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down
all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to
capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of
production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to
become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous
cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus
rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the
country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries
dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the
West. The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of
the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means
of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this
was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate
interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation,
with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one
customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and
more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of
Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steamnavigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation,
canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had
even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie
built itself up, were generated in feudal society.

At a certain stage in the development of these
means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and
exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the
feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive
forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution
adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its
relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such
gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to
control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade
past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive
forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the
conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the
commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society
on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In
these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an
absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state
of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off
the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and
why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry,
too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further
the development of the conditions of bourgeois property;

on the contrary, they have become too
powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these
fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of
bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth
created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by
enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new
markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the
way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby
crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against
the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called
into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the
proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the
proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as
they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These
labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of
commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the
fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He
becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and
most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman
is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and
for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is
equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work
increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of
labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by
prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by
increased speed of machinery, etc.

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. The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more
modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of
women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the
working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their
age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he
receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the
landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

There it is.

The first 4 pages of the communist manifesto.

Ikr

Yeah, that thing looks awesome!

It’s $8,000 @-@

Oh, well I probably wasn't gonna get it, but it still looks cool

bb-8 run!