Modern Update to The Communist Manifesto — Part 2

II. The Wage-Dependent Class and Advocates of Collective Ownership

What is the relationship between advocates of collective ownership and the wage-dependent class as a whole?

Advocates of collective ownership do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interests separate from those of the wage-dependent class as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own to shape and mold the working-class movement.

Advocates of collective ownership differ from other working-class parties in only two ways:

1. In national struggles of workers in different countries, they point out and bring forward the common interests of the entire wage-dependent class, regardless of nationality.

2. In the various stages of development through which the struggle between the wage-dependent class and the wealthy elite passes, they always represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

Therefore, advocates of collective ownership are practically the most advanced and determined section of working-class parties in every country—the section that pushes forward all others. Theoretically, they have the advantage of clearly understanding the conditions, direction, and ultimate results of the wage-dependent class movement.

The immediate aim of advocates of collective ownership is the same as that of all other working-class parties: formation of the wage-dependent class into a class, overthrow of wealthy elite rule, conquest of political power by the wage-dependent class.

The theoretical conclusions of collective ownership are not based on ideas or principles invented or discovered by some would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual conditions of an existing class struggle and historical movement taking place before our eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not uniquely characteristic of collective ownership.

All property relations in the past have continually changed with historical conditions. For example, the French Revolution abolished feudal property in favor of wealthy elite property.

The distinguishing feature of collective ownership is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of wealthy elite property. Modern private property of the wealthy elite is the final and most complete expression of producing and appropriating products based on class antagonisms and on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of collective ownership may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We advocates of collective ownership have been accused of wanting to abolish the right to personally acquire property as the fruit of one’s own labor—property that is allegedly the basis of all personal freedom, activity, and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Are you talking about the property of the petty artisan and small farmer—a form of property that preceded the wealthy elite form? There’s no need to abolish that; the development of industry has largely destroyed it and continues to destroy it daily.

Or are you talking about modern wealthy elite private property?

But does wage labor create property for the wage worker? Not at all. It creates capital—property that exploits wage labor and can increase only by creating new wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property in its present form is based on the antagonism between capital and wage labor. Let’s examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist means having not only a personal position but a social position in production. Capital is a collective product and can be set in motion only by the united action of many members of society—ultimately, by the united action of all members of society.

Capital is therefore not a personal power, but a social power.

When capital is converted into common property, belonging to all members of society, it’s not personal property that is transformed into social property. Only the social character of the property changes—it loses its class character.

Now let’s look at wage labor.

The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage—the amount of necessities required to keep the worker alive as a worker. Therefore, the wage worker through their labor merely secures enough for bare existence and reproduction. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of labor products needed for maintaining human life. This appropriation creates no surplus to give power over other people’s labor. We want to eliminate the miserable character of this appropriation, where the worker lives merely to increase capital and is allowed to live only as long as the interests of the ruling class require it.

In wealthy elite society, living labor is only a means to increase accumulated labor. In a collective society, accumulated labor is only a means to enhance, enrich, and improve the life of the worker.

In wealthy elite society, the past dominates the present; in collective society, the present dominates the past. In wealthy elite society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And abolishing this state of affairs is called abolishing individuality and freedom by the wealthy elite! Rightly so. Abolishing wealthy elite individuality, independence, and freedom is precisely our aim.

By freedom, under current production conditions, they mean free trade, free buying and selling.

But if buying and selling disappears, so does free buying and selling. Talk about free buying and selling, like all the other “freedom” rhetoric of the wealthy elite, has meaning only in contrast with restricted buying and selling in earlier times. It has no meaning when opposing the collective abolition of buying and selling, of the wealthy elite conditions of production, and of the wealthy elite itself.

You are horrified that we intend to abolish private property. But in your existing society, private property is already abolished for nine-tenths of the population. It exists precisely because it doesn’t exist for those nine-tenths. You reproach us for intending to abolish a form of property whose necessary condition is the non-existence of property for the immense majority of society.

In a word, you accuse us of intending to abolish your property. That’s exactly what we intend.

From the moment labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent—into a social power capable of being monopolized—from the moment when personal property can no longer be transformed into wealthy elite property, into capital, from that moment, you claim, individuality is abolished.

You admit, then, that by “individual” you mean no one other than the wealthy elite owner. This person must indeed be swept away and made impossible.

Collective ownership deprives no one of the power to appropriate social products; it only removes the power to use such appropriation to subjugate the labor of others.

Some object that upon abolishing private property, all work will cease and universal laziness will take over.

If this were true, wealthy elite society would have collapsed long ago from idleness, because those who work acquire nothing, and those who acquire things don’t work. This objection just restates the tautology that there can be no wage labor when there is no capital.

All objections against the collective mode of producing and appropriating material products have also been extended to the production and appropriation of intellectual work. Just as the wealthy elite sees the end of class property as the end of production itself, they see the end of class culture as the end of all culture.

The culture they mourn is, for the vast majority, merely training to act as a machine.

Don’t argue with us by using your wealthy elite notions of freedom, culture, law, etc., to critique our intended abolition of wealthy elite property. Your very ideas are products of wealthy elite production and property relations. Just as your jurisprudence is only the will of your class made into law—a will whose content is determined by the material conditions of your class.

Your self-interested misconception—transforming into eternal laws of nature and reason the social relations springing from your current mode of production and property—is shared with all ruling classes before you. What you understand about ancient property or feudal property, you cannot, of course, understand about your own wealthy elite form of property.

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical become indignant at this infamous proposal of the advocates of collective ownership.

What is the basis of the present family—the wealthy elite family? It’s based on capital and private gain. In its fully developed form, it exists only among the wealthy elite. But this state of things finds its complement in the forced absence of the family among workers and in public prostitution.

The wealthy elite family will naturally vanish with the vanishing of its complement, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you accuse us of wanting to stop parents from exploiting their children? We confess to this crime.

But you will say we destroy the most hallowed relationship by replacing home education with social education.

Isn’t your education also determined by society? By the social conditions under which you educate? By the direct or indirect intervention of society through schools, etc.? Advocates of collective ownership aren’t inventing society’s influence on education; they merely seek to alter its character and rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The wealthy elite rhetoric about family and education, about the hallowed relationship between parents and children, becomes all the more disgusting as modern industry destroys all family ties for the workers and transforms their children into simple articles of commerce and tools of labor.

But the wealthy elite cry in chorus: “You want to introduce community of women!”

The wealthy elite see their wives as mere instruments of production. They hear that the instruments of production are to be commonly utilized and naturally conclude that women will share the same fate.

They have no clue that the point is to end the status of women as mere instruments of production.

Furthermore, nothing is more ridiculous than the wealthy elite’s virtuous indignation at the supposed “official community of women” under collective ownership. Advocates of collective ownership don’t need to introduce a community of women; it has almost always existed.

Our wealthy elite, not content with having the wives and daughters of their workers at their disposal—not to mention common prostitution—take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Wealthy elite marriage is really a system of wives in common. At most, advocates of collective ownership might be criticized for wanting to replace a hypocritically concealed community of women with an openly legalized one. Besides, it’s obvious that with the abolition of current production relations, the community of women springing from them—that is, public and private prostitution—will also disappear.

Advocates of collective ownership are further criticized for wanting to abolish countries and nationality.

Workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they don’t have. Since the wage-dependent class must first acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation, it is national, though not in the wealthy elite sense.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are increasingly vanishing with the development of the wealthy elite, freedom of commerce, the world market, and the uniformity in the mode of production and corresponding conditions of life.

The supremacy of the wage-dependent class will cause them to vanish even faster. United action among leading civilized countries is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the wage-dependent class.

As the exploitation of one individual by another ends, so too will the exploitation of one nation by another. When class antagonism within nations disappears, the hostility between nations will also cease.

The criticisms against collective ownership made from religious, philosophical, and ideological standpoints don’t deserve serious examination.

Does it require deep insight to understand that human ideas, views, and conceptions change with every change in the conditions of human existence, social relations, and social life?

What does the history of ideas prove except that intellectual production changes with material production? The dominant ideas of any age have always been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they merely express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have developed, and that the dissolution of old ideas keeps pace with the dissolution of old conditions.

When the ancient world was dying, ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed to rationalist ideas in the 18th century, feudal society fought its death battle with the revolutionary wealthy elite. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely reflected the rule of free competition in the realm of knowledge.

“Undoubtedly,” some will say, “religious, moral, philosophical, and legal ideas have changed throughout historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, and law have always survived these changes.”

“There are also eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., common to all social conditions. But collective ownership abolishes eternal truths, abolishes all religion and morality, instead of reshaping them. It therefore contradicts all past historical experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has been the development of class antagonisms—antagonisms that took different forms in different epochs.

But whatever form they took, one fact is common to all past ages: the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all variety and differences, moves within certain common forms—forms of consciousness that will completely dissolve only with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The collective ownership revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let’s move on from the wealthy elite’s objections to collective ownership.

We have seen that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the wage-dependent class to the position of ruling class—to win the battle for democracy.

The wage-dependent class will use its political supremacy to gradually take all capital from the wealthy elite, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State (i.e., the wage-dependent class organized as the ruling class), and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, this cannot be done immediately except by means of despotic interference with property rights and wealthy elite production relations—by measures that seem economically insufficient and untenable, but which become unavoidable as means of revolutionizing the entire mode of production.

These measures will naturally differ in different countries. However, in most advanced countries, the following will generally apply:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all land rents to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive 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 hands of the state, through a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of transportation and communication in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; bringing fallow lands into cultivation and improving soil quality according to a common plan.

8. Equal obligation to work for all. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combining agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual elimination of the distinction between town and country through a more equitable distribution of the population.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Elimination of child 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 the whole community, public power will lose its political character. Political power is merely the organized power of one class oppressing another. If the wage-dependent class, in fighting the wealthy elite, necessarily unites as a class, makes itself the ruling class through revolution, and as the ruling class forcibly sweeps away the old conditions of production, then along with these conditions it will eliminate class antagonisms and classes generally, and will thereby abolish its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old wealthy elite 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.

A Note on Marx’s Masterpiece: What Time Has Taught Us

Ever had that moment when your company announces “streamlining operations to maximize shareholder value” and suddenly half your coworkers are clearing out their desks? Or noticed how your phone is designed to break just after the warranty expires? Or maybe you’ve watched as your neighborhood’s mom-and-pop shops get replaced by chain stores that somehow all pay minimum wage while their CEOs buy second yachts?

That’s the ghost of Marx nodding in vindication. The man called these shots like a sports commentator who could see 175 years into the future.

Marx nailed the diagnosis so precisely it’s almost uncomfortable. When your boss talks about the “unfortunate necessity” of outsourcing your department while announcing record quarterly profits, you’re watching Marx’s analysis play out in real time. When algorithms track your bathroom breaks at the warehouse, you’re experiencing exactly the dehumanization he described. His predictions about wealth concentration, worker alienation, and global markets steamrolling national boundaries weren’t wild guesses—they were mathematical certainties he spotted before anyone else.

But here’s where things get complicated—and where we can learn something vital from history’s experiments with his solutions.

When the Cure Became Another Disease

The problem wasn’t that Marx was wrong about capitalism’s contradictions. The problem was that his prescription didn’t account for something fundamental about human nature.

Remember how you felt when your roommate used your car without asking? Or when someone took credit for your idea at work? That’s not just “bourgeois conditioning”—it’s something deeper. Ownership isn’t just some artificial concept we can educate away. It’s wired into us at a level that’s hard to reprogram.

When revolutionary movements tried eliminating private property entirely, they created a power vacuum that practically begged for authoritarian takeover. Without the diffusion of power that comes from distributed ownership, control centralized faster than you can say “new boss, worse than the old boss.” Workers who thought they were getting liberation found themselves with different masters but similar chains—and often much worse conditions.

It’s like if your entire apartment building decided that “private bedrooms” were bourgeois and had to be abolished. Suddenly your most intimate space is subject to committee decisions. The idea might sound equal on paper, but in practice, the guy who speaks loudest at building meetings is somehow always sleeping in the room with the best view.

Finding the Third Path

The thing is, unfettered capitalism absolutely produces the exploitation Marx described. You don’t need economic theory to see it—just look at your paycheck compared to your productivity, or your rent compared to your landlord’s mortgage. But completely abolishing private property created equally devastating power imbalances. Different roads, same destination: concentrated power and widespread suffering.

Most of us intuitively understand this. We want decent wages, affordable healthcare, and housing that doesn’t consume half our income. We also want to choose our own careers, decide where to live, and own our personal effects without committee approval. These aren’t contradictory desires—they’re the foundation of a dignified life.

The path forward isn’t choosing between unchecked capitalism or authoritarian control. It’s building systems that democratize ownership rather than abolishing it, that regulate markets rather than eliminating them, and that balance our need for both individual agency and collective support.

This isn’t compromising on principles—it’s recognizing that human beings are complex creatures who need both personal autonomy and collective security to thrive. Any system that ignores either part of this equation will eventually fail, no matter how perfect it looks on paper.

Countries that have found this balance—like the Nordics with their social democracies—consistently rank highest in both economic security and personal freedom. Not because they found some perfect midpoint between capitalism and communism, but because they built pragmatic systems that respect the full scope of human needs and motivations.

Marx was right that a system built primarily on extraction and exploitation will eventually collapse under its contradictions. He was wrong that the solution required abolishing the concept of ownership itself. We can—and must—do better than either extreme.

Later in this book, we’ll explore exactly how everyday people are already building these alternatives—not through grand revolutions, but through thousands of smaller acts of resistance and creation that are quietly constructing a more humane economic system. Not because they’ve read Marx, but because they’re tired of being exploited and have decided to do something about it.