Karl Marx & Friedrich EngelsSociology 100

They have a world to win

• “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.” (473)– Communism already acknowledged by all

European powers to be itself a power.– Time to meet the “nursery tale” of the Spectre of

Communism with a manifesto

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The Crisis of the Bourgeois World• Modern bourgeois society, which “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 netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.” (478)

• “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 there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier

epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production.” (478)• Crisis not exceptions to, but part of the economic system• Social consequences of over-production?

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The Crisis of the Bourgeois World

• “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also forged the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.” (478)– “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e. capital, is

developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat.” (479)• The bourgeoisie necessarily generates the proletariat

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Proletarians

• The proletarians are “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 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.” (479)

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Proletarians

• “He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and easily acquire knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.”– “As the repulsiveness of the work increases, the

wage decreases” (479)

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Proletarians

• As industry develops, the proletariat increases in number, it is concentrated in masses, begins to have class consciousness– Defeated in premature conflicts, but rises stronger

and stronger• As the final crisis approaches, a small section of the

ruling class joins itself to the proletariat• “Social scum” (lumpenproletariat) do not work, are w/o

class consciousness, prepared for the “part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue”

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Proletarians• “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,

independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.” (482)– The proletariat already exists under the conditions of

communism• “The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife

and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour [everywhere] has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” (482)

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Communism• The distinguishing feature of Communism is not

the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of private property [capital].

• But they earned it!– “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 personal, it is a social power.” (485)

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Communism• But you will do away with freedom!– Insofar as freedom means bourgeois conditions of

production, free trade, free selling and buying, yes. But this is only bourgeois freedom.

• You’re abolishing individuality!– “From the moment when individual property can no

longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capita, from that moment you, say, individuality vanishes.” By individuality, then, you must mean only the bourgeoisie, as proletarians have no capital. Communists don’t want to deprive people of the ability to appropriate the products of society, only “of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such an appropriation.” (486)

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Communism

• You’ll destroy culture!– Only bourgeois culture, which the bourgeois think

to be synonymous with culture itself. The culture the bourgeois enjoys “is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.” (487)• The reigning ideology is always the ideology of the

ruling class

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Communism• “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at

this infamous proposal of the Communists.” (487)– Bourgeois family organized around capital. When capital is

abolished, so will be the bourgeois family.• The family is already little more than an economic

arragement.– Children exploited by parents

• If the bourgeois care about family so much, why do they compel children to work in their factories, or tear families apart on the labor market?

– Wives exploited by husbands• “The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.”

(488)• Abolition of current means of production also abolition “of

prostitution both public and private.” (488)

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Communism

• “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 proletarit will cause them to vanish still faster.” (488)

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Despotic Inroads

• “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...”

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Despotic Inroads• “...then it will, along with these conditions, have

swept away the existence of class antagonisms and class 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.” (491)– The proletariat abolishes all classes, including itself– The end of history

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Revolution

• 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 proletarian have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

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