Part 4 — Position of the Communists

Section II has made clear the relations of the communists to the existing working-class parties. Part 4 states the tactical position country by country. In England: the Chartists. In America: the Agrarian Reformers. In Switzerland: the Radicals, despite their mixed composition. In Poland: the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation. In Germany: the communists fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way against the absolute monarchy — but they never cease to instil into the working class the clearest recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, so that the German workers may immediately use the conditions of bourgeois rule as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie.

Germany is given special attention. It is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation than seventeenth-century England or eighteenth-century France. Its bourgeois revolution will therefore be only the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution. In short: 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, 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 Manifesto closes in twelve words that have been translated into every major language on earth. 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. The pamphlet ends where it began: with an address not to a party but to a class — and with an insistence that the class already exists, internationally, whether or not it has yet recognised itself.