The Communist Manifesto | Page 9

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.
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. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of
our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole
superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
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.
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.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen,
on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to
oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it
can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of
serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the
petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to
develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead
of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below
the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and
pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here
it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the
ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon
society as an over-riding law. 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.

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 grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of
the proletariat are equally inevitable.
II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
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
is 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
entire proletariat, independently of 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