The Communist Manifesto — themes & analysis

The first sentence of Part 1 is also the Manifesto's central argument. 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 — the pairs change costume but the structure persists. History is not the accumulation of liberty, not the flowering of reason, not the action of great individuals. It is conflict over the surplus produced by labour, organised through whatever property forms the productive powers of the age permit.

The claim is polemical against two adversaries at once. Against conservative historiography, which treated each social order as natural and ordained, Marx and Engels insist every order is transient and rests on coercion. Against liberal narrative, which attributed progress to ideas — rights, reason, enlightenment — they insist ideas follow material conditions. The Reformation did not produce capitalism; the rise of the burgher class produced both the Reformation and capitalism. The consciousness of the ruling class about itself is downstream of the mode of production.

The modern epoch is distinguished not by ending the struggle but by simplifying it. The bourgeoisie has stripped away the feudal motley — the guild privileges, the local immunities, the hereditary stations — and left two great hostile camps directly facing each other. Where the medieval serf had a lord, a priest, a guild-master, and a bailiff, the modern worker confronts a single antagonist: capital. This simplification is what makes the proletarian revolution possible; the struggle becomes legible, solidarity becomes thinkable across trades, cities, and nations.

The framework is also predictive. If history is the working out of class antagonisms through changes in productive forces, then the bourgeois order, like the feudal order before it, will produce the conditions of its own dissolution. The Manifesto reads this as already underway in commercial crises, in the concentration of capital, in the proletarianisation of small producers. The reader is not being persuaded to want a revolution. The reader is being told one is coming and offered a vocabulary for it.

Where to follow it: Preamble (the spectre named), Part 1 (the historical thesis), Part 4 (the conclusion).

Part 1 contains the strangest passage in the political literature of the left: a hymn to the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. It 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 left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment. The tone is not regret. It is recognition.

The bourgeoisie has done what no previous ruling class managed. 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. It has created enormous cities. It has rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. It has drawn even the most barbarian nations into civilisation through the cheap prices of its commodities, which are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls.

The famous formula captures what is dissolved: all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. Trades, hierarchies, pieties, family forms, national insularities — every fixed, fast-frozen relation is swept away. 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. Permanent insecurity, perpetual disturbance, everlasting uncertainty are not failures of the bourgeois order; they are its essence.

The argument turns on this celebration. Precisely because the bourgeoisie revolutionises everything, it cannot stop. It calls into existence the modern proletariat — concentrated, propertyless, organised in factories, transported by railways, addressed by mass newspapers — and arms that proletariat with the very productive forces that will be turned against it. The bourgeoisie is praised here because the praise is the indictment. A class whose nature is to dissolve all stable relations cannot expect its own relations to remain stable. It has produced its negation.

Where to follow it: Part 1 (the hymn to the bourgeoisie), Part 2 (property defended against its critics).

The second half of Part 1 introduces the modern working class — 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, exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. The definition is technical and unsparing. The proletarian is not the poor in general; the proletarian is the wage-labourer whose only property is the capacity to work.

Industry transforms this class. The craft workshop is replaced by the factory; the master-journeyman relation is replaced by the foreman-operative relation; the worker becomes an appendage of the machine. Skill, age, and sex distinctions lose their social validity; all are instruments of labour, costing more or less according to age and sex. Wages tend toward subsistence. Hours lengthen. The introduction of new machinery and the division of labour intensify the exploitation. The condition is degrading and, the authors insist, generative.

The proletariat passes through stages of struggle. Isolated workers fight individual employers. Factory workers fight the local factory-owner. Workers in a trade combine across factories. Modern industry, by herding the proletariat into great cities and connecting them by improved means of communication, makes the struggle national. Every class struggle is a political struggle. Trade unions, strikes, political associations — these are the organisational forms in which the proletariat, almost without willing it, constitutes itself as a class.

The conclusion is the famous one. Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its own product. The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains. It has a world to win. The bourgeoisie produces, above all, its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Where to follow it: Part 1 (the proletariat defined and developed), Part 2 (the proletariat organised as the ruling class).

Part 2 opens with the objection the authors expect to dominate every drawing-room conversation about communism: you would abolish property. The reply is precise and almost universally misread. The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. 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.

The argument distinguishes carefully. The hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property of the small artisan and small peasant is not what is at stake; that form of property has already been destroyed, and is daily being destroyed, by the development of industry. Personal property — the means of subsistence, the products of one's own labour — is not threatened. What is threatened is capital: 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.

The authors then pre-empt the standard objections in series. Communism would abolish individuality? Bourgeois society has already abolished the individuality of nine-tenths of its members. Communism would abolish the family? Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common — and the bourgeoisie has long practised the seduction of proletarian women. Communism would abolish the fatherland? The workingmen have no country; one cannot take from them what they have not got. Communism would abolish religion, morality, eternal truths? These are themselves products of historical conditions and change with them.

The reply is rhetorical and revealing. Each charge is reversed and handed back. The bourgeois is not defending universal goods against communist destruction; the bourgeois is defending the particular form those goods have taken under capital. The ten-point programme follows: graduated income tax, abolition of inheritance, centralisation of credit, free public education, abolition of child factory labour. Transitional measures, applicable in the most advanced countries, in the hands of the proletariat organised as the ruling class.

Where to follow it: Part 2 (property and the ten-point programme).

The closing summons is the line that has travelled furthest: workers of the world, unite. It is not a slogan added at the end. It is a conclusion drawn from the structure of the argument. If the bourgeoisie has, by its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country, then the working class it produces is also, of necessity, international. National industries are dislodged by new industries that work up raw material drawn from the remotest zones and whose products are consumed in every quarter of the globe. The conditions of life are universalised. So is the conflict.

The Manifesto does not deny that the proletariat must first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. The struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must first acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation. But this is national only in form. The content is international from the start, because capital is international from the start. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

The polemical edge cuts against two opponents. Against the patriotic socialists who would build socialism in a single nation by appeal to national tradition, the authors insist that workers have no country. Against the cosmopolitan liberals who would dissolve all boundaries through free trade, the authors insist that bourgeois cosmopolitanism is the cosmopolitanism of the market, not of solidarity. The internationalism of the Manifesto is the internationalism of the exploited recognising that their condition is the same in Manchester, Paris, Berlin, and Lyons.

The summons closes a document that began as a private commission and ends as a public address. 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. Workers of the world, unite. The address is not to a party. It is to a class that, the authors insist, already exists across borders, whether or not it knows itself yet.

Where to follow it: Part 1 (cosmopolitan production), Part 4 (the closing summons).