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Marx/Engels: Manifesto of the
Communist Party
IV. Position of the Communists
in Relation to the Various
Existing
Opposition Parties
Section II has made clear the relations of
the Communists to the existing working-class parties, such as
the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in
America.
The Communists fight for the attainment of
the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary
interests of the working class; but in the movement of the
present, they also represent and take care of the future of
that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the
Social-Democrats against the conservative and radical
bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a
critical position in regard to phases and illusions
traditionally handed down from the great Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals,
without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of
antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the
French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that
insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for
national emancipation, that party which fomented the
insurrection of Cracow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie
whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute
monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant,
to instill into the working class the clearest possible
recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and
proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway
use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social
and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily
introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after
the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight
against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly
to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois
revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced
conditions of European civilisation and with a much more
developed proletariat than that of England was in the
seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because
the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to
an immediately 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
front, as the leading question in each, the property question,
no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labour 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 to lose but their
chains. They have a world to win.
Proletarians of All
Countries, Unite!
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