Modern Update to The Communist Manifesto — Part 1

A specter is haunting the world—the specter of collective ownership. All the powers of the old order have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: traditional political leaders and religious authorities, conservatives and liberals, security agencies and media conglomerates.

Where is the opposition party that hasn’t been labeled “communist” by those in power? Where is the opposition that hasn’t thrown the accusation of communism back at more progressive parties as well as at its reactionary opponents?

Two things result from this fact:

1. Collective ownership is already acknowledged by all powers to be itself a power.

2. It’s time for advocates of collective ownership to openly publish their views, aims, and tendencies, and to counter this nursery tale of the “Communist Specter” with a clear statement of principles.

To this end, advocates of collective ownership from various countries have assembled and drafted the following manifesto.

I. Wealthy Elite and Wage-Dependent Class

The history of all societies has been the history of class struggles. Throughout history—whether between freemen and slaves, nobles and commoners, lords and serfs, or craft masters and workers—oppressors and oppressed have constantly opposed each other. This conflict, sometimes hidden and sometimes open, has always ended either in society being fundamentally changed or in the mutual destruction of both classes.

In earlier periods of history, we find almost everywhere a complex arrangement of society into various ranks and positions. In ancient Rome, there were patricians, knights, plebeians, and slaves. In medieval times, there were feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journeymen, apprentices, and serfs. In almost all these classes, there were further gradations.

Modern society hasn’t eliminated class conflicts. It has simply established new classes, new conditions of oppression, and new forms of struggle to replace the old ones.

Our era—the era of the wealthy elite—has simplified class antagonisms. Society is increasingly splitting into two great hostile camps: the Wealthy Elite and the Wage-Dependent Class.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages came the first urban workers. From these early workers, the first elements of the wealthy elite developed.

The discovery of America and new sea routes to Asia created new markets for the rising wealthy elite. These markets, colonial trade, and increased exchange of goods gave unprecedented momentum to commerce, shipping, and industry, and thereby accelerated the decline of feudal society.

The feudal system of production organized through guilds could no longer meet the growing demands of new markets. Manufacturing replaced it. Guild masters were pushed aside by the industrial middle class. The division of labor between different guilds disappeared in favor of division of labor within individual workshops.

But markets kept growing and demand kept rising. Even manufacturing proved inadequate. Steam power and machinery revolutionized industrial production. Mass production replaced manufacturing, and industrial millionaires—the modern wealthy elite—replaced the middle-class manufacturers.

Modern industry created the global market, which began with the discovery of America. This market greatly expanded trade, shipping, and land transportation. These developments further expanded industry. As industry, commerce, shipping, and railways grew, the wealthy elite also grew their power and wealth, pushing aside the older social classes from medieval times.

The wealthy elite is the product of a long development process involving a series of revolutions in production and exchange methods.

Each stage in the development of the wealthy elite was accompanied by corresponding political advancement. An oppressed class under feudal nobility, then self-governing associations in medieval communes, then “third estate” taxpayers in monarchies, and finally the exclusive political power in modern representative governments—the wealthy elite has at last won complete political control. Modern government is simply a committee for managing the common affairs of the entire wealthy elite.

The wealthy elite has played a truly revolutionary role in history.

Wherever it has gained power, it has destroyed feudal, patriarchal, and idyllic relationships. It has pitilessly torn apart the complex ties that bound people to their “natural superiors,” leaving no connection between people except naked self-interest and callous payment. It has drowned religious fervor, chivalric enthusiasm, and sentimental nostalgia in the icy water of selfish calculation. It has reduced personal worth to exchange value and replaced numerous hard-won freedoms with the single, merciless freedom of “free trade.” In short, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, and brutal exploitation for exploitation that was veiled by religious and political illusions.

The wealthy elite has stripped the halo from every profession previously honored and looked up to with reverence. It has turned doctors, lawyers, priests, poets, and scientists into its paid employees.

The wealthy elite has torn away the sentimental veil from family relationships and reduced them to purely financial transactions.

The wealthy elite has revealed how the brutal display of force in medieval times, which reactionaries so admire, found its natural complement in the laziest indolence. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals. It has conducted expeditions far more impressive than all former migrations of peoples and crusades.

The wealthy elite cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing production, disrupting social conditions, and creating endless uncertainty and agitation. All fixed, established relationships, with their train of ancient and respected beliefs and opinions, are swept away; new ones become outdated before they can solidify. Everything established and stable evaporates, everything sacred is profaned, and people are finally forced to face the real conditions of their lives and their relationships with others with clear minds.

The need for constantly expanding markets drives the wealthy elite across the entire globe. They must establish connections everywhere.

Through exploiting the world market, the wealthy elite has made production and consumption international. Despite the protests of reactionaries, they have removed the national foundation from under industries. Traditional national industries have been destroyed and continue to be destroyed daily. They are replaced by new industries whose products are consumed worldwide. These industries no longer use local raw materials but draw them from the most distant regions. Their products are consumed not only domestically but in every part of the world. National self-sufficiency and isolation have given way to global interdependence. This happens in material production and also in intellectual creation. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become increasingly impossible, and from the many national and local literatures, a world literature arises.

The wealthy elite rapidly improve all instruments of production and greatly enhance communication, drawing even the most remote regions into civilization. Their cheap products are the heavy artillery with which they batter down all Chinese Walls and force “barbarian” nations to adopt their mode of production. They compel all nations to adopt this new economic system or face extinction. They force them to introduce so-called civilization into their midst—that is, to become like the wealthy elite themselves. In short, they create a world in their own image.

The wealthy elite have subjected rural areas to urban rule. They have created enormous cities, vastly increased urban populations compared to rural ones, and rescued a significant portion of the population from rural isolation. Just as they’ve made the countryside dependent on cities, they’ve made non-industrialized countries dependent on industrialized ones, agricultural nations on manufacturing nations, and the East on the West.

The wealthy elite increasingly eliminate the scattered state of the population, means of production, and property. They have centralized population, concentrated the means of production, and concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence was political centralization. Independent or loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and tax systems, were brought together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one border, and one customs tariff.

During its rule of barely one hundred years, the wealthy elite has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than all preceding generations combined. They have harnessed natural forces, introduced machinery, applied chemistry to industry and agriculture, developed steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, cleared whole continents for cultivation, made rivers navigable, and created whole populations seemingly out of thin air. What earlier century could have imagined that such productive forces lay dormant in the womb of social labor?

We have seen that the means of production and exchange that formed the basis of the wealthy elite were created in feudal society. At a certain stage, the feudal relations of property became incompatible with the already developed productive forces. They became fetters that had to be broken, and they were broken.

They were replaced by free competition, along with a social and political system appropriate to it and the economic and political dominance of the wealthy elite.

A similar movement is now occurring before our eyes. Modern society, with its relations of production, exchange, and property—a society that has created such powerful means of production and exchange—is like a sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that they have called up. For decades, the history of industry and commerce has been the history of modern productive forces revolting against modern production relations—against the property relations that are essential for the wealthy elite’s existence and rule. Commercial crises, by their periodic return, increasingly threaten the existence of the entire wealthy elite society. During these crises, a significant portion of not only existing products but also previously created productive forces are regularly destroyed. A strange epidemic breaks out in these crises—an epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself back in a momentary state of barbarism; it appears as if a famine or a universal war has cut off supplies; industry and commerce seem destroyed. Why? Because society has too much civilization, too many means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at society’s disposal no longer further the development of wealthy elite property relations. On the contrary, they have become too powerful for these relations and are held back by them. When they break through these fetters, they bring disorder to wealthy elite society and endanger the existence of wealthy elite property. The wealthy elite system is too narrow to contain the wealth it creates. How does the wealthy elite overcome these crises? On one hand, by destroying a mass of productive forces; on the other, by conquering new markets and more thoroughly exploiting old ones. How? By paving the way for more extensive and destructive crises and diminishing the means of preventing them.

The wealthy elite used economic tools to defeat feudalism, but now these same tools threaten their own position. They’ve not only created the weapons of their own destruction but also produced the people who will use these weapons—the modern wage-dependent class.

As capital develops, the wage-dependent class develops as well. This class only lives so long as it finds work, and it finds work only so long as its labor increases capital. These workers, who must sell themselves piece by piece, are a commodity like any other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition and market fluctuations.

Due to extensive use of machinery and division of labor, the work of the wage-dependent class has lost all individual character and attraction. The worker becomes a mere appendage of the machine, required to perform only the simplest, most monotonous, and most easily learned tasks. Therefore, the cost of the worker is limited almost entirely to the means of subsistence needed for their maintenance and reproduction. But the price of a commodity, including labor, equals its cost of production. As the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Even more, as machinery and division of labor increase, the burden of work increases, whether through longer working hours, increased work demanded in a given time, or accelerated machine speeds.

Modern industry has converted the small workshop of the artisan into the large factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of workers, crowded into factories, are organized like soldiers. As privates in the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. They are not only slaves of the wealthy elite class and the wealthy elite state but are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the supervisor, and, above all, by the individual factory owner. This despotism becomes more hateful and bitter the more openly it proclaims profit-making as its purpose.

The less skill and physical strength required in manual labor, the more modern industry develops, the more women’s work displaces men’s. Age and gender differences no longer have social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, depending on their age and gender.

As soon as the worker’s exploitation by the factory owner ends with receiving their cash wage, they are set upon by other portions of the wealthy elite—the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class—small business owners, shopkeepers, retired tradespeople, artisans, and farmers—all sink into the wage-dependent class. This happens partly because their small capital doesn’t suffice for large-scale industry and is overwhelmed by competition with large capitalists, and partly because their specialized skills are devalued by new production methods. The wage-dependent class is thus recruited from all classes of the population.

The wage-dependent class goes through various stages of development. Their struggle with the wealthy elite begins with their very existence. At first, individual workers fight, then the workers at a single factory, then the workers of one trade in one locality against the individual wealthy elite who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against wealthy elite production relations but against the instruments of production themselves. They destroy imported goods that compete with their labor, smash machinery, burn factories, and try to restore the lost status of the medieval worker.

At this stage, workers form an incoherent mass scattered across the country and divided by competition. If workers unite, this is not yet due to their own active unity but due to the unity of the wealthy elite, which must mobilize the entire wage-dependent class to achieve its own political goals. At this stage, workers don’t fight their own enemies but the enemies of their enemies—the remnants of absolute monarchy, landowners, and non-industrial wealthy elite. The entire historical movement is thus concentrated in the hands of the wealthy elite; every victory so obtained is a victory for the wealthy elite.

But as industry develops, the wage-dependent class 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 wage-dependent class become more and more equalized as machinery obliterates work distinctions and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. Growing competition among the wealthy elite and resulting commercial crises make workers’ wages increasingly unstable. The ever-improving machinery makes their livelihoods more precarious. Collisions between individual workers and individual wealthy elite increasingly take the character of collisions between two classes. Workers begin to form unions against the wealthy elite; they band together to maintain wage rates. They form permanent associations to prepare for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the struggle breaks out into riots.

Sometimes workers are victorious, but only temporarily. The real fruit of their battles lies not in immediate success but in the expanding unity of workers. This unity is helped by improved communication created by modern industry that connects workers in different locations. It’s this connection that’s needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into a national struggle between classes. Every class struggle is a political struggle. And the union that medieval citizens needed centuries to establish, with their primitive roads, modern workers achieve in a few years thanks to railways.

The organization of the wage-dependent class into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually disrupted by competition among the workers themselves. But it always rises again, stronger, firmer, and more powerful. It takes advantage of divisions among the wealthy elite themselves and forces recognition of workers’ interests in legal form. Examples include the ten-hour workday law in England.

Conflicts within the old society generally further the development of the wage-dependent class. The wealthy elite finds itself in constant battle. Initially with the aristocracy, later with those portions of the wealthy elite whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry, and always with the wealthy elite of other countries. In all these battles, it is forced to appeal to the wage-dependent class, to ask for its help, and thus to draw it into the political arena. The wealthy elite itself, therefore, supplies the wage-dependent class with its own elements of political and general education—in other words, it provides weapons against itself.

As we’ve seen, entire sections of the ruling class are thrown into the wage-dependent class by the advance of industry, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. They also supply the wage-dependent class with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, as the class struggle nears its decisive hour, the dissolution process within the ruling class, within the whole old society, assumes such a violent character that a small portion of the ruling class breaks away and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, in the past, a section of the nobility went over to the wealthy elite, now a portion of the wealthy elite goes over to the wage-dependent class, particularly some of the wealthy elite intellectuals who have achieved a theoretical understanding of the entire historical movement.

Of all the classes that confront the wealthy elite today, only the wage-dependent class is truly revolutionary. Other classes decay and finally disappear with modern industry; the wage-dependent class is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class—small manufacturers, small merchants, artisans, farmers—all fight against the wealthy elite to save their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are not revolutionary but conservative. Even more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If they are revolutionary, it’s only because they face joining the wage-dependent class; they defend not their present interests but their future interests. They abandon their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the wage-dependent class.

The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution. Its conditions of life, however, prepare it more for the role of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

The social conditions of the old society no longer exist for the wage-dependent class. The wage-dependent worker has no property; their relationship with their spouse and children has nothing in common with modern wealthy elite family relations. Modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped the worker of every trace of national character. Law, morality, and religion are to the worker merely wealthy elite prejudices, behind which lurk wealthy elite interests.

All previous classes that won power sought to secure their already acquired status by subjecting society to their conditions of appropriation. The wage-dependent class can only win the productive forces of society by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby abolishing all previous modes of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and 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 wage-dependent class movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The wage-dependent class, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot rise up without exploding the whole superstructure of social classes above it.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the wage-dependent class against the wealthy elite is at first a national struggle. The wage-dependent class of each country must, of course, first settle matters with its own wealthy elite.

In outlining the most general phases of the development of the wage-dependent class, we traced the more or less veiled civil war raging within existing society up to the point where it breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the wealthy elite lays the foundation for the power of the wage-dependent class.

All previous societies have been based, as we have seen, on the antagonism between oppressing and oppressed classes. But to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured under which it can 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 member of the wealthy elite. The modern worker, 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. This clearly proves that the wealthy elite is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence on society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it cannot 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 wealthy elite—that is, the wealthy elite’s existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and rule of the wealthy elite class are the formation and growth of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the workers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the wealthy elite, replaces the isolation of the workers due to competition with their revolutionary unity due to association. Thus, the development of modern industry cuts from under the wealthy elite’s feet the very foundation on which they produce and appropriate products. What the wealthy elite therefore produces, above all, are their own grave-diggers. Their fall and the victory of the wage-dependent class are equally inevitable.