Manifesto of
the Communist Party
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
1848
1 Bourgeois and Proletarians
2 Proletarians and Communists
3 Socialist and Communist Literature
4 Position of the Communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties
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 [1]
The history of all hitherto existing society [2] is the history of class
struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master [3]
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 c