Friedrich Engels

“ And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing not true requirements but the requirements of truth, not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, and exists only in the misty realm of philosophical phantasy. ”

“ As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. ”

“ This eagerness of the leading bourgeoisie to adopt, at least the outward show of Socialism, was caused by a great change that had come over the working classes of Germany. There had been ever since 1840 a fraction of German workmen, who, travelling in France and Switzerland, had more or less imbibed the crude Socialist or Communist notions then current among the French workmen. The increasing attention paid to similar ideas in France ever since 1840 made Socialism and Communism fashionable in Germany also, and as far back as 1843, all newspapers teemed with discussions of social questions. ”

“ Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as heaven from earth, from that of the French philosophers.
For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way in [53] the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. ”

“ A society that not only could never reconcile these contradictions, but drove them ever more to a climax. Such a society could only exist by a continual open struggle of all classes against one another, or under the supremacy of a third power that under a pretense of standing above the struggling classes stifled their open conflict and permitted a class struggle only on the economic field, in a so-called "legal" form. Gentilism had ceased to live. It was crushed by the division of labor and by its result, the division of society into classes. ”

“ Besides, it does not occur to any Communist to wish to revenge himself upon individuals, or to believe that, in general, the single bourgeois can act otherwise, under existing circumstances, than he does act. English Socialism, i.e. Communism, rests directly upon the irresponsibility of the individual. Thus the more the English workers absorb communistic ideas, the more superfluous becomes their present bitterness, which, should it continue so violent as at present, could accomplish nothing; and the more their action against the bourgeoisie will lose its savage cruelty. ”

“ All contrivances with which society endows itself by means of civilisation are in direct opposition to their original purpose. "It is beyond question and a foundation principle of the entire public law that people made rulers to defend their liberties, not to destroy them." And yet these rulers become of necessity the oppressors of the people and they carry the oppression to the point [172] where inequality is brought to a climax and, then, transformed into its opposite, again becomes the reason of equality, for to despots all are equal, that is equally of no account. ”

“ All the celebrities of middle class Liberalism were here collected. The bourgeoisie expected wonders; it earned shame for itself and its representatives. The industrial and commercial capitalist class were more severely defeated in Germany than in any other country; they were first worsted, broken, expelled from office in every individual State of Germany, and then put to rout, disgraced and hooted in the Central German Parliament. Political Liberalism, the rule of the bourgeoisie, be it under a Monarchical or Republican form of government, is forever impossible in Germany. ”

“ Practically there is no further need to devise interrelations but to discover them in facts rather. Instead of a philosophy forced from nature and history there remains then only the realm of pure thought—as far as any is left—the teaching of the laws of the thinking process itself, logic and the dialectic.
With the Revolution of 1848 "educated" Germany delivered the challenge to theory [Pg 126] and proceeded to action. Hand-labor dependent upon small production and manufacture was done away with by the great industry—Germany again appeared in the world-market. ”

“ 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 of 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. ”

“ Facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of [90] bourgeois economy as to the identity of the interests of capital and labor, as to the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would be the consequence of unbridled competition. All these things could no longer be ignored, any more than the French and English Socialism, which was their theoretical, though very imperfect, expression. But the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests, knew nothing of economic interests ”

“ But for all that the English working-class is moving, as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had to report to his brother Katheder-Socialists. It, moves, like all things in England, with a slow and measured step, with hesitation here, with more or less unfruitful, tentative attempts there; it moves now and then with an over-cautious mistrust of the name of Socialism, while it gradually absorbs the substance; and the movement spreads and seizes one layer of the workers after another. ”

“ The gentiles confronted these masses as a compact body of privileged individuals. What had once been a natural democracy, had been transformed into an odious aristocracy. The gentile constitution had grown out of a society that did not know any internal contradictions, and it was only adapted to such a society. It had no coercive power except public opinion. But now a society had developed that by force of all its economic conditions of existence divided humanity into freemen and slaves, and exploiting rich and exploited poor. ”

“ The bourgeoisie, which wanted no serious revolutionary convulsion, were satisfied with what we have seen they considered "practicable," namely a union of all Germany, exclusive of Austria, under the supremacy of a Constitutional Government of Prussia; and surely, without conjuring dangerous storms, nothing more could, at that time, be done. The shopkeeping class and the peasantry, as far as these latter troubled themselves about such things, never arrived at any definition of that German unity they so loudly clamoured after ”

“ The practical revolutionary experience of 1848-1849 confirmed the reasonings of theory, which led to the conclusion that the Democracy of the petty traders must first have its turn, before the Communist working class could hope to permanently establish itself in power and destroy that system of wage-slavery which keeps it under the yoke of the bourgeoisie. Thus the secret organization of the Communists could not have the direct purpose of upsetting the present Governments of Germany. ”

“ Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, a middle class movement, Communism a working class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, "respectable"; Communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning was, that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself," there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have ever since been far from repudiating it.
The "Manifesto" being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. ”

“ The Utopians' mode of thought has for a long time governed the socialist ideas of the nineteenth century, and still governs some of them. Until very recently all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason, and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. ”

“ But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil 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. ”

“ And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive one of the other. Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. ”

“ The second center of revolutionary action was Berlin, and from what has been stated in the foregoing papers, it may be guessed that there this action was far from having that unanimous support of almost all classes by which it was accompanied in Vienna. In Prussia, the bourgeoisie had been already involved in actual struggles with the Government; a rupture had been file result of the "United Diet"; a bourgeois revolution was impending, and that revolution might have been, in its first outbreak, quite as unanimous as that of Vienna, had it not been for the Paris Revolution of February. ”

“ Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian Communism, in France, of Cabet, and in Germany, of Weitling. ”

“ Humble and crouchingly submissive under a powerful feudal or monarchical Government, it turns to the side of Liberalism when the middle class is in the ascendant; it becomes seized with violent democratic fits as soon as the middle class has secured its own supremacy, but falls back into the abject despondency of fear as soon as the class below itself, the proletarians, attempts an independent movement. ”

“ The Church is well aware of this fact to her sorrow for the industrial proletarian seldom darkens her portals. He has no hatred of religion, as the atheistic radical bourgeois had, but with a good-natured "non possumus" says by his actions what Engels says by his philosophy.
Revolution is an every day occurrence with the industrial proletarian. He sees processes transformed in the twinkling of an eye. He wakes up one morning to find that the trade which he has learned laboriously has overnight become a drug on the market. ”

“ By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working class movement, and looking rather to the "educated" classes for support. ”

“ Socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German Philistines. In Germany the petty bourgeois class, a relique of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things. ”

“ From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society ”