Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; English edition of 1888)

Their wordsThe history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

Their wordsThe executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

Their wordsThe bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

Their wordsOwing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, 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.

Their wordsWhat the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Their wordsIn this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

Their wordsBut in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.

Their wordsCommunism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.

Their wordsThe working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.

Their wordsThe ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Their wordsThe proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Their wordsPolitical power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.

Their wordsIn 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.

Their wordsChristian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

Their wordsThey desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.

Their wordsIn proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification.

Their wordsThe 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.

Their wordsThe proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.