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Excerpts from Frederick Engels' Principles of Communism. An outstanding
exposition of many basic points of Marxism. Even though it was written even before
the Communist Manifesto, it retains its validity in its basic points.
Q. What is Communism?
A. Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation
of the proletariat.
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Q. What is the proletariat?
A. The proletariat is that class in society which draws its
means of livelihood wholly and solely from the sale of its labour and not from the profit
from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose whole existence
depends on the demand for labour, hence, on the alternations of good times and bad in
business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or class of
proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the nineteenth century.
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Q. Proletarians,
then, have not always existed?
A. No. Poor folk and working classes have always existed, and
the working classes have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor
people living under the conditions just stated; in other words, there have not always been
proletarians any more than there has always been free and unbridled competition.
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Q. How did the
proletariat originate?
A. The proletariat originated in the industrial revolution which
took place in England in the second half of the last [eighteenth] century and which has
since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world. This industrial
revolution was brought about by the invention of the steam-engine, various spinning
machines, the power loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines
which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the
whole previous mode of production and ousted the former workers because machines turned
out cheaper and better commodities than could the workers with their inefficient
spinning-wheels and hand-looms. These machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of
the big capitalists and rendered the workers' meagre property (tools, hand-looms, etc.)
entirely worthless, so that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing
remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the
textile industry.
Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been
given, this system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and
book-printing, pottery, and the metalware industry. Labour was more and more divided among
the individual workers, so that the worker who formerly had done a complete piece of work,
now did only part of that piece. This division of labour made it possible to supply
products faster and therefore more cheaply. It reduced the activity of the individual
worker to a very simple, constantly repeated mechanical motion which could be performed
not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell one
after another under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as
spinning and weaving had already done. But at the same time they also fell into the hands
of the big capitalists, and there too the workers were deprived of the last shred of
independence. Gradually, not only did manufacture proper come increasingly under the
dominance of the factory system, but the handicrafts, too, did so as big capitalists
ousted the small masters more and more by setting up large workshops which saved many
expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labour.
This is how it has come about that in the civilized countries almost all kinds of
labour are performed in factories, and that in almost all branches handicraft and
manufacture have been superseded by large-scale industry. This process has to an ever
greater degree ruined the old middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has
entirely transformed the condition of the workers; and two new classes have come into
being which are gradually swallowing up all others, namely:
- The class of big capitalists, who in all civilized countries are already in
almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistence and of the raw materials and
instruments (machines, factories) necessary for the production of the means of
subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.
- The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labour to
the bourgeoisie in order to get in exchange the means of subsistence necessary for their
support. This class is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.
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Q. Under
what conditions does this sale of the labour of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take
place?
A. Labour is a commodity like any other and its price is
therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime
of large-scale industry or of free competition -- as we shall see, the two come to the
same thing -- the price of a commodity is on the average always equal to the costs of
production. Hence the price of labour is also equal to the costs of production of labour.
But the costs of production consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence
necessary to keep the worker fit for work and to prevent the working class from dying out.
The worker will therefore get no more for his labour than is necessary for this purpose;
the price of labour or the wage will therefore be the lowest, the minimum, required for
the maintenance of life. However, since business is sometimes worse and some times better,
the worker receives sometimes more and some times less, just as the factory owner
sometimes gets more and sometimes less for his commodities. But just as the factory owner,
on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than
their costs of production, so the worker will, on the average, get no more and no less
than this minimum. This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the
degree to which large-scale industry has taken possession of all branches of production.
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Q. What working
classes were there before the industrial revolution?
A. According to the different stages of the development of
society, the working classes have always lived in different circumstances and had
different relations to the owning and ruling classes. In antiquity, the working people
were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward countries
and even in the southern part of the United States. In the Middle Ages they were the serfs
of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, Poland and Russia. In the
Middle Ages and right up to the industrial revolution there were also journeymen in the
towns who worked in the service of petty-bourgeois masters. Gradually, as manufacture
developed, there emerged manufacturing workers who were even then employed by larger
capitalists.
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Q. In
what way does the proletarian differ from the slave?
A. The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell
himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, the property of a single master, is
already assured an existence, however wretched it may be, because of the master's
interest. The individual proletarian, the property, as it were, of the whole bourgeois class,
which buys his labour only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This
existence is assured only to the proletarian class as a whole. The slave is outside
competition, the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries. The slave counts
as a thing, not as a member of civil society; the proletarian is recognized as a person,
as a member of civil society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the
proletarian, but the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and
himself stands on a higher level than the slave. The slave frees himself when, of all the
relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby
becomes a proletarian himself; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private
property in general.
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Q. In
what way does the proletarian differ from the serf?
A. The serf enjoys the possession and use of an instrument of
production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he hands over a part of his product or
performs labour. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another for
the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the
proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf
is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf frees himself either by running
away to the town and there becoming a handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money
instead of labour and products, thereby becoming a free tenant; or by driving his feudal
lord away and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering in one way or another
into the owning class and into competition. The proletarian frees himself by abolishing
competition, private property and all class differences.
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Q. In what way does
the proletarian differ from the handicraftsman?
A. In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman,
as he still existed almost everywhere in the past [eighteenth] century and still exists
here and there at present, is a proletarian at most temporarily. His goal is to acquire
capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can often achieve this goal where
guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not yet led to the
introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition. But
as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition
flourishes fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and
more a proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by be coming either
bourgeois or entering the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of
competition (as is now more often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining
the proletarian movement, i.e., the more or less conscious communist movement.
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Q. In what way
does the proletarian differ from the manufacturing worker?
[Manufacture here refers to the cottage industry, small scale production - not the
massive factories we have today - Editor]
A. The manufacturing worker of the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries almost everywhere still had the ownership of his instrument of production, his
loom, the family spinning wheels, and a little plot of land which he cultivated in his
free hours. The proletarian has none of these things. The manufacturing worker lives
almost always in the countryside under more or less patriarchal relations with his
landlord or employer; the proletarian dwells mostly in large towns, and his relation to
his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his
patriarchal conditions by large-scale industry, loses the property he still owns and in
this way himself becomes a proletarian.
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Q. What
were the immediate consequences of the industrial revolution and of the division of
society into bourgeois and proletarians?
A. First, the lower and lower prices of industrial
products brought about by machine labour totally destroyed in all countries of the world
the old system of manufacture or industry based on manual labour. In this way, all
semi-barbarian countries, which had hitherto been more or less strangers to historical
development and whose industry had been based on manufacture, were forcibly dragged out of
their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities of the English and allowed their own
manufacturing workers to be ruined. Countries which had known no progress for thousands of
years, for example India, were thoroughly revolutionized, and even China is now on the way
to a revolution. We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England today
deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year's time. In this way
large-scale industry has brought all the peoples of the earth into contact with each
other, has merged all the small local markets into one world market, has everywhere paved
the way for civilization and progress, and thus ensured that whatever happens in the
civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. Therefore, if the
workers of England or France free themselves now, this must set off revolutions in all
other countries -- revolutions which sooner or later will lead to the liberation of the
workers there too.
Second, wherever large-scale industry displaced manufacture, the industrial
revolution developed the bourgeoisie, its wealth and its power to the highest degree and
made it the first class in the country. The result was that wherever this happened the
bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and ousted the hitherto ruling
classes, the aristocracy, the guild-masters and the absolute monarchy representing the
two. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing
entail, that is, the non-saleability of landed property, and all the nobility's
privileges. It destroyed the power of the guild-masters by abolishing all guilds and craft
privileges. In their place it put free competition, that is, a state of society in which
each has the right to engage in any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of
the necessary capital. The introduction of free competition is thus a public declaration
that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals
are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the
bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. Free competition is necessary for the
establishment of large-scale industry because it is the only state of society in which
large-scale industry can make its way. Having destroyed the social power of the nobility
and the guild-masters, the bourgeoisie also destroyed their political power. Having risen
to the first class in society, the bourgeoisie proclaimed itself the first class also in
politics. It did this through the introduction of the representative system which rests on
bourgeois equality before the law and the legal recognition of free competition, and in
European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these constitutional
monarchies, only those who possess a certain amount of capital are voters, that is to say,
only the bourgeoisie; these bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois
deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government.
Third, everywhere the industrial revolution built up the proletariat in the
same measure in which it built up the bourgeoisie. The proletarians grew in numbers in the
same proportion in which the bourgeois grew richer. Since proletarians can only be
employed by capital, and since capital can only increase through employing labour, the
growth of the proletariat proceeds at exactly the same pace as the growth of capital.
Simultaneously, this process draws the bourgeoisie and the proletarians together in large
cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing together
great masses in one spot it gives the proletarians a consciousness of their own
strength. Moreover, the more this process develops and the more machines ousting manual
labour are invented, the more large-scale industry depresses wages to the minimum, as we
have indicated, and thereby makes the condition of the proletariat more and more
unbearable. Thus, by the growing discontent of the proletariat, on the one hand, and its
growing power on the other, the industrial revolution prepares the way for a proletarian
social revolution.
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Q. What were the
further consequences of the industrial revolution?
A. Large-scale industry created in the steam-engine and other
machines - the means of endlessly expanding industrial production in a short time
and at low cost. With production thus facilitated, the free competition which is
necessarily bound up with large-scale industry soon assumed the most extreme forms; a
multitude of capitalists invaded industry, and in a short while more was produced than
could be used. The result was that the manufactured goods could not be sold, and a
so-called commercial crisis broke out. Factories had to close, their owners went bankrupt,
and the workers were without bread. Deepest misery reigned everywhere.
After a while, the superfluous products were sold, the factories began to operate
again, wages rose, and gradually business got better than ever. But it was not long before
too many commodities were produced again and a new crisis broke out, only to follow the
same course as the previous one. Ever since the beginning of this [nineteenth] century the
condition of industry has constantly fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods
of crisis, and a fresh crisis has occurred almost regularly every five to seven years,
bringing in its train the greatest hardship for the workers, general revolutionary
stirrings and the direst peril to the whole existing order of things.
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Q. What
follows from these periodic commercial crises?
A. First, that although large-scale industry in its
earliest stage created free competition, it has now outgrown free competition; that for
large-scale industry competition and generally the individualistic organization of
industrial production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter; that so long as
large-scale industry is conducted on its present footing, it can be maintained only at the
cost of general chaos every seven years, each time threatening the whole of civilization
and not only plunging the proletarians into misery but also ruining large sections of the
bourgeoisie; hence either that large-scale industry must itself be given up, which is an
absolute impossibility, or that it makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new
organization of society in which industrial production is no longer directed by mutually
competing individual factory owners but rather by the whole society operating according to
a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all.
Second, that large-scale industry and the limitless expansion of production
which it makes possible bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so
much of all the necessaries of life is produced that every member of society is enabled to
develop and to apply all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. It thus appears
that the very qualities of large-scale industry which in present-day society produce all
the misery and all the commercial crises are those which under a different social
organization will abolish this misery and these catastrophic fluctuations.
It is therefore proved with the greatest clarity:
- That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no
longer corresponds to the existing conditions; and
- That the means are ready at hand to do away with these evils altogether through a new
social order.
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Q. What
kind of a new social order will this have to be?
A. Above all, it will generally have to take the running of
industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing
individuals and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are
operated by society as a whole, that is, for the common account, according to a common
plan and with the participation of all members of society. It will, in other words,
abolish competition and replace it with association. Moreover, since the management of
industry by individuals has private property as its inevitable result, and since
competition is merely the manner and form in which industry is run by individual private
owners, it follows that private property cannot be separated from the individual
management of industry and from competition. Hence, private property will also have to be
abolished, and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of
production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement -- in a
word, the so-called communal ownership of goods. In fact, the abolition of private
property is the shortest and most significant way to characterize the transformation of
the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry, and
for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.
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Q. Was
therefore the abolition of private property impossible at an earlier time?
A. Right. Every change in the social order, every revolution in
property relations has been the necessary consequence of the creation of new productive
forces which no longer fitted into the old property relations. Private property itself
originated in this way. For private property has not always existed.
When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production in the
form of manufacture, which could not be subordinated to the then existing feudal and guild
property, this manufacture, which had out grown the old property relations, created a new
form of property, private property.
For manufacture and the first stage of the development of large-scale industry, private
property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only
possible social order. So long as it is impossible to produce so much that there is enough
for all, with some surplus of products left over for the increase of social capital and
for the further development of the productive forces, there must always be a dominant
class, having the disposition of the productive forces of society, and a poor, oppressed
class. The way in which these classes will be constituted will depend on the stage of the
development of production.
The Middle Ages depending on agriculture give us the baron and the serf; the towns of
the later Middle Ages show us the guild-master, and the journeyman and the day labourer;
the seventeenth century has the manufacturer and the manufacturing worker; the nineteenth
century has the big factory owner and the proletarian. It is clear that hitherto the
productive forces had never been developed to the point where enough could be produced for
all, and that for these productive forces private property had become a fetter, a barrier.
Now, however, when the development of large-scale industry has, firstly, created
capital and the productive forces have been expanded to an unprecedented extent, and the
means are at hand to multiply them without limit in a short time; when, secondly,
these productive forces are concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois, while the great
mass of the people are increasingly falling into the ranks of the proletarians and their
situation is becoming more wretched and intolerable in proportion to the increase of
wealth of the bourgeoisie; when, thirdly, these mighty and easily extended forces
of production have so far outgrown private property and the bourgeoisie that they unleash
at any moment the most violent disturbances of the social order -- only now, under these
conditions, has the abolition of private property become not only possible but absolutely
necessary.
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Q. Will
it be possible to bring about the abolition of private property by peaceful means?
A. It would be desirable if this could happen, and the
communists would certainly be the last to oppose it. The communists know only too well
that all conspiracies are not only useless but even harmful. They know all too well that
revolutions are not made at will and arbitrarily, but that everywhere and at all times
they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which were quite independent of the
will and the direction of individual parties and entire classes. But they also see that
the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been forcibly
suppressed, and that in this way the opponents of the communists have been working towards
revolution with all their strength. If the oppressed proletariat is thereby finally driven
to revolution, then we communists will defend the cause of the proletarians with deeds
just as we now defend it with words.
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Q. Will it be possible
to abolish private property at one stroke?
A. No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one
stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.
Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able
gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the
necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.
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Q. What will be the
course of this revolution?
[While these answers may seem outdated for modern industrial countries, but are in
general still applicable especially in the so-called "developing world" -
Editor]
A. Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution and
thereby directly or indirectly the political rule of the proletariat. Directly in England,
where the proletarians already constitute the majority of the people. Indirectly in France
and in Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians but
also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are now in the process of falling into the
proletariat, who are more and more dependent on the proletariat in all their political
interests and who must therefore adapt themselves to the demands of the proletariat.
Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the
proletariat.
Democracy would be quite valueless to the proletariat if it were not
immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property
and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the
necessary result of existing relations, are the following:
- Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes,
abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.), forced loans,
and so forth.
- Gradual expropriation of land owners, factory owners, railway and shipping magnates,
partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the
form of bonds.
- Confiscation of the possessions of all émigrés and rebels against the majority of the
people.
- Organization of labour or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in
factories and workshops, thereby putting an end to competition among the workers and
compelling the factory owners, insofar as they still exist, to pay the same high wages as
those paid by the state.
- An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private
property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture.
- Centralization of the credit and monetary systems in the hands of the state through a
national bank operating with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks
bankers.
- Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railways, and ships; bringing
new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation -- all in the
same proportion as the growth of the capital and labour force at the disposal of the
nation.
- Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mothers' care, in
national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.
- Construction on national lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated
groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture, and combining in their way of
life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and
drawbacks of either.
- The demolition of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.
- Equal right of inheritance for children born in and out of wedlock.
- Concentration of all means of transport in the hands of the nation.
It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will
always bring others in its wake. Once the first radical attack upon private property has
been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate
increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all industry, all
transport, all commerce. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they
will become feasible and their centralizing effects will develop in the same proportion as
that in which the productive forces of the country are multiplied through the labour of
the proletariat. Finally, when all capital, all production, and all exchange have been
brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own
accord, money will become superfluous, and production will have so increased and men will
have so changed that the last forms of the old social relations will also be sloughed off.
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Q. Will it
be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?
A. No. By creating the world market, large-scale industry has
already brought all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into
such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the
others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of all civilized countries to
such an extent that in all of them bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the two
decisive classes of society and the struggle between them the main struggle of the day.
The communist revolution, therefore, will be not merely a national one; it will take place
in all civilized countries simultaneously, that is to say, at least in England, America,
France and Germany. It will in each of these countries develop more quickly or more slowly
according as one country or the other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a
more significant mass of productive forces. Hence it will go most slowly and will meet
most obstacles in Germany; most rapidly and easily in England. It will have a powerful
impact on the other countries of the world and will radically alter and accelerate their
course of development up to now. It is a universal revolution and so will have universal
range.
[In fact a successful revolution in ANY country in the world would have a shock wave
effect on the rest of the world which is now more globalized and inter-connected than ever
- editor]
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Q. What will
be the consequences of the final abolition of private property?
A. Society will take all the productive forces and means of
commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of
private capitalists and will administer them in accordance with a plan based on the
available resources and on the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of
all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of large-scale
industry will be abolished. There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which
for the present order of society is over-production and hence a prevailing cause of
misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of
generating misery, over-production will reach beyond the elementary requirements of
society to as sure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and at
the same time the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition and the stimulus
to new progress, it will achieve this progress without invariably, as heretofore, throwing
the social order into confusion.
Large-scale industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo an
expansion comparing with its present level as does the latter with that of manufacture.
This development of industry will make available to society a mass of products sufficient
to satisfy the needs of all. The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from
the pressure of private property and the parcellation of land. Here existing improvements
and scientific procedures will be put into practice and mark an entirely new upswing,
placing at the disposal of society a sufficient mass of products. In this way such an
abundance of goods will be produced that society will be able to satisfy the needs of all
its members. The division of society into different mutually hostile classes will thus
become unnecessary. Indeed, it will not only be unnecessary, but irreconcilable with the
new social order.
The existence of classes originated in the division of labour and the division of
labour as it has been known hitherto will completely disappear. For mechanical and
chemical devices alone are not enough to bring industrial and agricultural production up
to the level we have described; the capacities of the people setting these devices in
motion must experience a corresponding development. Just as the peasants and the
manufacturing workers of the last [eighteenth] century changed their whole way of life and
became quite different people when they were impressed into large-scale industry, in the
same way, the communal operation of production by society as a whole and the resulting new
development of production will both require and generate an entirely different kind of
human material. Communal operation of production cannot be carried on by people as they
are today, when each individual is subordinated to a single branch of production, bound to
it, exploited by it, and has developed only one of his faculties at the expense of
all others, knows only one branch, or even one branch of a single branch of
production as a whole. Even present-day industry is finding such people less and less
useful.
Communal planned industry operated by society as a whole presupposes human beings with
many-sided talents and the capacity to oversee the system of production in its entirety.
The division of labour which makes a peasant of one man, a cobbler of another, a factory
worker of a third, a stock-market operator of a fourth, has already been undermined by
machinery, and will completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to
familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass successively from
one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own
inclinations. It will therefore free them from the one-sided character which the
present-day division of labour impresses on every individual. Society organized on a
communist basis will thus give its members the opportunity to put their many-sidedly
developed talents to many-sided use. But when this happens classes will necessarily
disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the
existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society
provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other.
A corollary of this is that the antithesis between town and country will likewise
disappear. The running of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two
different classes is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of
communist association. The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside
the crowding of the industrial population into big towns, is a condition which corresponds
to an undeveloped stage of both agriculture and industry and is already quite perceptible
as an obstacle to all further development.
The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of joint planned
exploitation of the productive forces, the expansion of production to the point where it
will satisfy the needs of all, the ending of a situation in which the needs of some are
satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes with
their contradictions, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society
through the elimination of the present division of labour, through industrial education,
through alternating activities, through universal sharing of the universally produced
sources of enjoyment, through the fusion of town and country -- these are the main
consequences of the abolition of private property.
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Q. What
will be the influence of the communist order of society on the family?
A. It will make the relations between the sexes a purely private
matter which concerns only the persons involved, and in which society must not intervene.
It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a
communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of marriage up to now -- the
dependence of the wife on the husband and of the children on their parents resulting from
private property. And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moralistic
philistines against the communistic "community of women." Community of women is
a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete
expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with
it. Thus communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes
it.
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Q. What
will be the attitude of the communist society to existing nationalities?
A. The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in
accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as
a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various
estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private
property.
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Q. What will
be its attitude to existing religions?
A. All religions so far have been the expression of historical
stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the
stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings
about their disappearance.
[By this he means that humanity will no longer have the need to explain things
by calling on some supernatural power. Once humanity has further conquered the
forces of nature through technology and the application of science towards meeting human
needs and wants instead of for greed and profit, then the role of religion, which is to
give a quick and easy explanation of the unexplained ("God meant it that
way!"), and to give hope to those suffering brutal oppression in their daily lives
("don't worry about the hell you live in now - turn the other cheek - there'll be pie
in the sky when you die!") will disappear just like the other institutions of class
rule. - Editor]
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