What does the Communist Manifesto actually say?

Capitalists should be scared!

The Manifesto starts with a terrifying statement followed by a blatant exaggeration. The opening line is about a ghost (spectre) hovering over Europe, a metaphor for communism. It’s a warning to the European ruling class: if you’re afraid of communism, you should be. The reality was different. While it’s true that workers around Europe were showing signs of revolt, there was no major communist movement to be worried about. A similar astonishing falsehood is in describing the movement as one already “acknowledged by all European powers.” In a self-fulfilling prophecy, what would later contribute to greatly increase the influence of communism is the very publication of this manifesto:

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 Czar, Metternich and Guizot , French Radicals and German police-spies.
…
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.¹Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (London, United Kingdom: Penguin Classics, 2014), 321.

Above, Marx and Engels listed some of the enemies of their movement: Pope and Czar (read: the Church and monarchic governments), Metternich (an important Austrian diplomat who was actively opposed to revolutionary movements) and Guizot (another conservative reactionary statesman who saw in the French revolution “a satanic quality”).

The “French Radicals” is a reference to a republican, liberal party which advocated the right to private property among other freedoms. They used the word “radical” because it was unlawful to label their emerging political party as “Republican.” In reality, they were bourgeois liberals who were detested by Marx and Engels and with whom they shared no vision. As for the German polices-spies, they created a particularly personal ordeal for the authors. The Prussian spies of the police state shut down dissident publications and continued to monitor activities of opponents even outside Germany. They kept a watch on Marx while living overseas, even as far as London. To escape their surveillance, Marx considered emigrating to the United States.

All history is a class struggle between the rich and the poor

The history of all hitherto existing societies 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 re-constitution 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 distinctive feature: it has simplified the 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.²Ibid., 322-323.

Do you think your government cares for you?

The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.³Ibid., 326.

The ruling class protects bourgeois affairs because they, themselves, are part of the bourgeoisie. However…

It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.⁴Ibid., 340.

Our enemy, the bourgeoisie, was once “revolutionary” too

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.⁵Ibid., 326.

Capitalist development, after feudalism, is a revolution of economic and social magnitude which Marx alludes to here:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. […] 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 and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, 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.⁶Ibid.

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, steam navigation, 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?⁷Ibid., 330.

You summoned the “demon” of capitalism and you’ll never be able control it!

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.

It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. 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.
…
And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand inforced 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.⁸Ibid., 330-331.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.⁹Ibid., 341.

Capitalism needs to grow, hence capitalists introduce it everywhere

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions 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 productions 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 selfsufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.

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 its 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.¹⁰Ibid., 328-329.

Who is the proletariat?

[T]he 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.¹¹Ibid., 332.

The proletariat was made up of but not limited to industrial workers. They were millions of factory workers, railway workers, miners, farmers, blacksmiths, clerks and others. All overworked and underpaid.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.¹²Ibid., 338.

Like cogs in a machine

These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, 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 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.¹³Ibid., 332.

Like soldiers, or even worse, like slaves!

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 over-looker, 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.¹⁴Ibid., 333.

As if your pay and work conditions are not bad enough…

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.¹⁵Ibid., 334.

Small business owners—the petite bourgeoisie—have nothing to celebrate

The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.¹⁶Ibid.

Don’t trust the petite bourgeoisie or expect them to join your revolution

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.¹⁷Ibid., 338.

The proletariat has evolved and continue to evolve

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.¹⁸Ibid., 334.

The workers join uprisings like the French Revolution, or riots against high prices of basic commodities or racist treatment but the core problem is the same which must be acknowledged: a class struggle.

At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition… At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the nonindustrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie. But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more.

The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.¹⁹Ibid., 335-336.

Large numbers of disgruntled workers in same places: It’s time to cooperate!

This union [of workers] is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.²⁰Ibid.

Ten Hours Act (aka Factory Act of 1847) restricted the work shift of women and children to only 10 hours a day!

The “scum people” and the danger they represent

The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.²¹Ibid., 338.

I, Marx, and Engels are bourgeois intellectuals but we’ve joined your ranks

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour…a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists [such as Marx and Engels], who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.²²Ibid., 337-338.

Who are the communists? What sets them apart from the proletariat?

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.²³Ibid., 342.

The first statement is true to some extent that communism is not in rivalry with other proletarians since they all share the same aims. Although, “separate party” was not used in the political sense at that point, one can’t help but notice a tinge of optimism by the authors. They did not foresee the competing interpretations of Marxism which plagued its politics throughout its history. The second statement regarding the communists holding no principles is clearly false. This manifesto represents many of their fundamental principles.

Who leads the revolution? The Communists

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.²⁴Ibid.

The above quote was an early conceptualization of revolutionary vanguards, the ones who lead the proletarian revolution. These are the communists would would form a political party. Vladimir Lenin would later expand this concept of a vanguard party into a post-revolution Communist Party (the Bolsheviks) imposing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” while protecting the revolutionary achievements. That was labelled Marxism-Leninism. What Karl Marx would have though of that? He did not write in much detail on how a dictatorship of the proletariat would operate, although he saw it as inevitable and acknowledged that violence will be necessary.

What do the communists want?

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.²⁵Ibid., 343.

Unlike movements of the past, communism is not utopian

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.²⁶Ibid.

Communism is above all the abolition of (capitalist) private property

The abolition of capitalist private property means the end of private control of the economy.

[T]he 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.²⁷Ibid., 344.

The authors explain above, and in the next quote, that their target is not personal posessions, but capitalist private property which is used to exploit the working class. Note that “private property” in the Manifesto is a reference to private control of the means of production, in other words, control of economic resources like factories, land, infrastructure, etc.

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.²⁸Ibid., 345.

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.²⁹Ibid., 347.

But the abolition of private property is not as radical as it seems

The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.³⁰Ibid., 343.

That’s true. Marx and Engels were not the first to call for collective ownership. Former visionaries made similar calls.

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 [ownership by lords] in favour of bourgeois property [ownership by capitalists]. 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.³¹Ibid.

Capitalists claim that the abolition of their property is an attack on their freedoms. We agree!

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past [accumulated wealth] dominates the present; in Communist society, the present [the working class] 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.³²Ibid., 346.

In other words, the true freedom is the one where the majority is no longer exploited by accumulated capital. More on that in the following quote:

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.³³Ibid.

Hard to defend private property when it’s nonexistent for 90% of the population

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.³⁴Ibid., 347.

Law, morality and religion exist only to preserve the Old Society: The Revolution will review it all!

A “class-conscious proletarian” is aware of that fact:

Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.³⁵Ibid., 338-339.

Should the traditional family be abolished? Yes it should be!

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.³⁶Ibid., 327.

One parent, the father, and sometimes both parents, have to work many hours while leaving the children alone or with someone else. Work shifts were in some factories up to 14 hours, 6 days a week. At a young age, children are sent to work in dire circumstances to bring home some money. Parents have more children than they desire or could look after because eventually in their old age, they need these children to feed the family.

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.³⁷Ibid., 348-349.

The traditional family will vanish once society is properly educated and capital is gone

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.³⁸Ibid.

Sharing the means of “reproduction”: Will communists treat women as common property?

The following criticism about “community of women,” i.e. being sexually available to all, was probably rooted in stories about free love experimentation within proto-socialist communes of the early 19th century. The most famous were established by the Saint-Simonian and Fourierist followers. It should be noted that some fringe communists continued to believe in free love, rather than “bourgeois marriage,” however it never took root on a wide scale in any of the communist societies of the 20th century.

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.

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.³⁹Ibid., 349-350.

The response to the bourgeois accusation that communists want to share women communally could be summed up in the following points:
a. The communists were pioneers in calling for full equality between men and women
b. But just because communists want to share “the means of production,” that doesn’t mean they want to share women too.
c. How dare the bourgeois speak of protecting proletarian women when they’re being exploited along with children in their factories?!
d. It’s the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat, who currently treat women as instruments. In fact, it’s the bourgeois men themselves who treat “women as common property,” as evident from their extra-marital relations and their use of prostitutes.
e. Liberation of women under communism might introduce free sexual relations, but that would be preferable to the hypocritical bourgeois institution of marriage.

Will all culture disappear without the bourgeois rule? We’ll replace their culture with a new one

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.⁴⁰Ibid., 348.

In summary, in a communist society, a new culture will have to replace bourgeois one which has always trained workers to be submissive.

Bourgeois justice: The ruling ideas are those approved by the ruling class

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.⁴¹Ibid., 352.

The dominant ideas and what is defined as good or bad, free or unjust are all set by the ruling class. Just like history is written by the victors, the dominant ideas in each society are chosen by the ruling class. Ideas that challenges the status quo are censored and never allowed to propagate through the means of communication controlled by capitalists. Such ideas turn into an ideology that indoctrinate children in schools and churches. Law enforcement, the court, the press and sometimes even art follow the same bourgeois ideology. For example, the Church preached that the suffering of the living (the workers) is inevitable, and despite their abuse they should not rebel but respect the authorities. Within that moral paradigm, it should not be surprising that most communist propositions in favor of the proletariat seem radical.

The next quote they confirm that they are radical as they seem since they make the widest shift away from the bourgeois traditions.

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.⁴²Ibid., 353.

The communist society will be founded on individual freedoms

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.⁴³Ibid., 355.

What makes the anticipated proletarian revolution different?

1. All previous revolutions replaced one exploiting class with another. Once the proletarian revolution is successful and all individual ownership is banned, there will be no more exploitation.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.⁴⁴Ibid., 339.

2. It’s a revolution by the majority for the majority.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.⁴⁵Ibid.

The workers’ revolution will have to be violent

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.⁴⁶Ibid., 340.

Conquer the enemy within your country but keep your vision international

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.⁴⁷Ibid., 339.

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.⁴⁸Ibid., 351.

Will communism abolish countries and nationalities? Yes but global business is already doing that!

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.⁴⁹Ibid., 350.

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.⁵⁰Ibid., 351.

The Marxist response to the criticism of abolishing countries is the following:
a. The workers of any country have more in common with workers of other countries than their own national bourgeoisie.
b. Communism can not survive as an island among capitalist nations. Eventually, the capitalists will wage war against them. If the bourgeoisie help one another across countries, then the proletariat should cooperate in a similar fashion.
c. The abolishing of countries is a process that had already started by those who often make this accusation, the capitalists, through their expanding global business.
d. When workers are ruling on a global scale, war will become unnecessary and obsolete. Also, that would bring an end to colonization, imperialism and the exploitation of poor countries by the rich ones.

What to do after you take political control? Seize all capital for the state and boost the production

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.⁵¹Ibid., 353.

The bourgeoisie won’t just give up capital, so the first communist stage has to be a reign of terror

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.⁵²Ibid., 353-354.

The following are guidelines for what to do after the revolution:

Post-revolution #1-3: abolish land ownership and inheritance, and impose taxes

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.⁵³Ibid.

Post-revolution #4-6: punish counter-revolutionaries, abolish private banks & control financial system

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.⁵⁴Ibid.

Post-revolution #7-9: seize infrastructure, seize all factories and make work compulsory for all

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, 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.⁵⁵Ibid., 354-355.

Post-revolution #10: abolish child labor, free education for all and combine it with vocational training

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.⁵⁶Ibid.

Let the ruling classes tremble because the communists are coming! Workers of the world, unite!

In the words “only by the forcible overthrow,” the writers remind us again in the final paragraph of their certainty that the upcoming revolution must be violent.

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!⁵⁷Ibid., 374.

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