Sociology Reading Precis

Manifesto of the Communist Party

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.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened

up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and

Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the

colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in

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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.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied

by a corresponding political advance in that class. An

oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an

armed and self-governing association of medieval commune:

here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany);

there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward,

in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either

the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise

against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies

in general — the bourgeoisie has at last, since the

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establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market,

conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive

political sway. The executive of the modern state is but

a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole

bourgeoisie.

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.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental

veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money

relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the

brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries

so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful

indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity

can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing

Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals;

it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former

exoduses of nations and crusades.

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

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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

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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.

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 civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations

of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the

scattered state of the population, of the means of production,

and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized

the means of production, and has concentrated property in a

few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political

centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected

provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems

of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with

one government, one code of laws, one national class interest,

one frontier, and one customs tariff.

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, canalization

or 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 labor?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on

whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated

in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of

these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under

which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal

organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one

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word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible

with the already developed productive forces; they became

so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were

burst asunder.