over night

1 he bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and thus rescued a considerable part of the pop- tilation from the idiocy of rural life... .

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarcely one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have X11 preceding generations together... .

Brit not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it 1-ias also called into existence the mein who are to wield those weapons —the modern working class. —the proletariat.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, develops, in the same proportion the proletariat, the modern vc%orking class, develops — 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 com- merce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes ofcomPetition, to all the fluctuations of the market... .

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product... .

The socialist and communist systems I~roperly so called,. those of Saint Simon, Fourier, Ou~en;5 and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped Period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie....

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a rime when the . proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic con- ception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.

But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society... .

5Saint-Simon, I'ourier, Owen: Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Splint-Simon (1760-1825), «gas an early advocate of socialism, as w1s Charles Fourier (1772-1837). Robert Owen (1771-1858) was an industrialist, utopian socialist, and trade union advocate. These socialist predecessors believed that capitalists and workers could overcome their antagonism and work cooperatively for the common good. As Nlarx and Engels believed "class struggle" to be the engine that drove history, they imply that these other soci~llists were naive to the point of delusiorlary, hence the "fant~lstic pictures" jibe that follows.

The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for

the enforcement of the momentary [i.e., current] interests of the working

class; but in the movement of the Present, they also represent and take care

of the future of that movement... .

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because

that country is on the eve of a l~otirgeois revolution that is bound to be car-

ried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and

with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the

seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the

bourgeois revolution in Germany will be lout the prelude to an immedi-

ately following proletarian revolution.

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 fore, as the leading question

in each, the property question, no matter ~~vhat its degree of development

~t the time. I~'inally, 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 Communistic

revolution. The proletarians have nothing i:o lose but their chains. They

have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!