Ch.03: II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS

챕터 분석 및 번역 준비

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In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to 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 Communist is the same as that of all the 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 the
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 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 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 a 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 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 bourgeoisie 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.

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 appropriation.

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 this objection is but
another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any
wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and
appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the
Communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just
as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance
of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical
with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a
mere training to act as a machine.

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition
of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom,
culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of
your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is
but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential
character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of
existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of
nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of
production and form of property—historical relations that rise and
disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with
every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of
ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of
course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous
proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On
capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists
only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in
the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public
prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement
vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their
parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace
home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social
conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of
society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the
intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character
of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling
class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed
co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by
the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn
asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and
instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole
bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that
the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally,
can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will
likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status
of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our
bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and
officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to
introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the
greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the
most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they
desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly
legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the
abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition
of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of
prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and
nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not
got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must
rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the
nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of
the word.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more
vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce,
to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the
conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United
action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first
conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end
to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In
proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the
hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and,
generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious
examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and
conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change
in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his
social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production
changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The
ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the
fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created,
and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution
of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were
overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to
rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then
revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of
conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the
domain of knowledge.

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral,
philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of
historical development. But religion, morality philosophy, political science,
and law, constantly survived this change.”

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc. that
are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it
abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new
basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical
experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has
consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed
different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages,
viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then,
that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and
variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which
cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class
antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property
relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture
with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class,
is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of
democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all
capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in
the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling
class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of
despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois
production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically
insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip
themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are
unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty
generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public
purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national
bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of
the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the
bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil
generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies,
especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition
of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of
the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools.     Abolition of
children’s factory labour in its present form.     Combination of
education with industrial production, &c., &c.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and
all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the
whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political
power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for
oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie
is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if,
by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such,
sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with
these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class
antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own
supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,
we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all.

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