The Post 100000000000000000000000000000000 game

[Maelstrom]

find the n

Found it.

[mikey]

Ctrl+F

that's what I did lol
there are over 100 "n"s on the page.
so I searched for MN and there was only one

[Maelstrom]

I. Shall. Not. Get. The. Prize.
None. Will. Ever. Help. Me.
If. You. Try. You. Will. Win.
Cuz. I. Will. Get. Creamed.

[Yugi]

no you're supposed to find the n

not the N

[Pit0010]

>__<

my eyes if I was searching for it

[Yugi]

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF6A2A462092A21CA

Putting this here so I can find it when I don't have homework

[Maelstrom]

stuff

[Yugi]

Prologue
A specter is haunting Europe--the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have
entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Czar, 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 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 specter of communism with a
manifesto of the party itself.

[Yugi]

I. Bourgeois and Proletarians
The history of all hitherto existing society 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 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 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 distinct feature: it has simplified
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.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these
burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 2
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising
bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the
colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce,
to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element
in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds,
now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took
its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor
between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single
workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer
sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by
industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the
way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to
communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and
in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed
down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development,
of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
* * * * *
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic
relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural
superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
"cash payment". It has drowned out 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 indefeasible chartered freedoms,
has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled
by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored 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 laborers. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 3
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family
relation into a mere money relation.
* * * * *
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and
thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of
the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence
for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance
of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from
all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices
and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All
that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober
senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire
surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections
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 reactionaries, 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 civilized 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 production 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 self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more
impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
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 civilization.
The cheap prices of 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 civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
* * * * *Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 4
. . . .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.
For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of
modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations
that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the
commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society
on its trial, each time more threateningly. 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 civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the
conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these
conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring
disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The
conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how
does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced 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.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the
bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into
existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat,
the modern working class, developed — a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work,
and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell
themselves piecemeal, 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 the division of labor, 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. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted,
almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation
of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of
production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the sameMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 5
proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the
increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory
of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized 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 overlooker, and, above all, in 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.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern
industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women.
Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All
are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives
his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the
shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and 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 new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all
classes of the population.
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 laborers, then by the work of people
of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who
directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois condition of production,
but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with
their labor, 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.
At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken
up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet
the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order
to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover
yet, for a time, able to do so. 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 non-industrial
bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands
of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 6
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 various
interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in
proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages
to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial
crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing 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 (trade
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.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not
in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union 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 centralize 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
proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organization 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.
Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in many ways the course of
development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first
with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have
become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries.
In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus to
drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own
elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons
for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry,
precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also
supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going
on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent,
glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionaryMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 7
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, who have raised themselves to
the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a
genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern
Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
* * * * *
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.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities.
The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority,
in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society,
cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super incumbent 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 the
feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary,
instead of rising with the process 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 overriding
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 fedMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 8
by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer
compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation
and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively
on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the 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, are 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 the 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
mold 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 lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian
movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all 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. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 9
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 favor 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.
* * * * *
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie,
to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized
as the ruling class; and to increase the total 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 revolutionizing the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in 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 rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with
state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization 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 obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 10
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all
the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the
populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory
labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
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 organized power of one class
for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the
force of circumstances, to organize 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.
IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties
* * * * *
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing
social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property
question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
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 communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win.

[Yugi]

WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

[The_Subjective_Thought]

YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS!

[BlackDragonSlayer]

Did you just...? Oh yeah you did.

[Maelstrom]

I didn't bother trying to read that ^

[Sebastian]

I. Bourgeois and Proletarians
The history of all hitherto existing society 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 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 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 distinct feature: it has simplified
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.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these
burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 2
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising
bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the
colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce,
to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element
in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds,
now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took
its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor
between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single
workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer
sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by
industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the
way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to
communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and
in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed
down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development,
of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
* * * * *
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic
relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural
superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
"cash payment". It has drowned out 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 indefeasible chartered freedoms,
has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled
by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored 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 laborers. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 3
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family
relation into a mere money relation.
* * * * *
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and
thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of
the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence
for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance
of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from
all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices
and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All
that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober
senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire
surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections
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 reactionaries, 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 civilized 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 production 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 self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more
impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
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 civilization.
The cheap prices of 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 civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
* * * * *Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 4
. . . .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.
For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of
modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations
that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the
commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society
on its trial, each time more threateningly. 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 civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the
conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these
conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring
disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The
conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how
does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced 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.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the
bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into
existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat,
the modern working class, developed — a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work,
and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell
themselves piecemeal, 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 the division of labor, 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. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted,
almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation
of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of
production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the sameMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 5
proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the
increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory
of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized 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 overlooker, and, above all, in 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.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern
industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women.
Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All
are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives
his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the
shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and 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 new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all
classes of the population.
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 laborers, then by the work of people
of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who
directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois condition of production,
but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with
their labor, 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.
At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken
up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet
the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order
to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover
yet, for a time, able to do so. 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 non-industrial
bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands
of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 6
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 various
interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in
proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages
to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial
crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing 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 (trade
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.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not
in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union 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 centralize 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
proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organization 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.
Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in many ways the course of
development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first
with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have
become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries.
In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus to
drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own
elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons
for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry,
precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also
supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going
on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent,
glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionaryMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 7
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, who have raised themselves to
the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a
genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern
Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
* * * * *
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.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities.
The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority,
in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society,
cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super incumbent 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 the
feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary,
instead of rising with the process 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 overriding
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 fedMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 8
by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer
compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation
and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively
on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the 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, are 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 the 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
mold 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 lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian
movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all 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. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 9
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 favor 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.
* * * * *
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie,
to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized
as the ruling class; and to increase the total 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 revolutionizing the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in 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 rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with
state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization 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 obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture. Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto - 10
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all
the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the
populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory
labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
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 organized power of one class
for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the
force of circumstances, to organize 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.
IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties
* * * * *
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing
social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property
question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
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 communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win.

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