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MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.
All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to
exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing 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. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was carried.
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But 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. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
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; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.
"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change."
"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc. that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy.
The 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.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will of course be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In 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.
III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE
1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM
A. Feudal Socialism
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England" exhibited this spectacle.
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different, and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy, water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The mediaeval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England.
This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture, patriarchal relations in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues.
C. German, or "True," Socialism
The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits, eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes the law of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally.
The world of the German literate consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view.
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literate reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote "Alienation of Humanity," and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote "dethronement of the Category of the General," and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of
the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of
Action," "True Socialism," "German Science of Socialism,"
"Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and so on.
The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. 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, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the German, and especially, of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings.
While this "True" 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 relic 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.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths," all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.
2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misere as an example of this form.
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.
Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class.
3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements, in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.
Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to the organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.
But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them—such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production, all these proposals, point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their earliest, indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.
The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In 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. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated "phalansteres," of establishing "Home Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria"—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem—and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.
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 themselves with the Social-Democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases 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 instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightaway 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 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.
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.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.
All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to
exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing 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. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was carried.
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But 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. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
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; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.
"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change."
"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc. that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy.
The 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.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will of course be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In 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.
III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE
1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM
A. Feudal Socialism
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England" exhibited this spectacle.
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different, and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy, water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism
The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The mediaeval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie.
In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England.
This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture, patriarchal relations in agriculture.
Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues.
C. German, or "True," Socialism
The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.
German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits, eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes the law of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally.
The world of the German literate consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view.
This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by translation.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literate reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote "Alienation of Humanity," and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote "dethronement of the Category of the General," and so forth.
The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of
the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of
Action," "True Socialism," "German Science of Socialism,"
"Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and so on.
The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. 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, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.
The fight of the German, and especially, of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.
It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings.
While this "True" 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 relic 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.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths," all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.
2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misere as an example of this form.
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.
Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class.
3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements, in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.
Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to the organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.
But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them—such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production, all these proposals, point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their earliest, indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.
The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In 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. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated "phalansteres," of establishing "Home Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria"—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem—and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.
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 themselves with the Social-Democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases 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 instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightaway 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 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.
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.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
נק' מוניטין:
62,133
THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO - Part 1
by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler
AS PUBLISHED BY
RANDOM HOUSE
New York
1958
© Copyright, 2000, by Patricia H. Kelso.
All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copy- right Conventions.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-5268
Published in San Francisco and simultaneously on the Internet by the Kelso Institute.
www.kelsoinstitute.org
2
PREFACE
While signing my name to THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO as coau- thor with Louis Kelso, I wish to disclaim any credit for the original and basic theory of capitalism on which this Manifesto is based. That theory is entirely Mr. Kelso’s. It is the product of many years of inquiry and thought on his part. The full statement of it will soon be published in Capitalism, of which Mr. Kelso is sole author.
I would also like to explain how I came to appreciate the criti- cal importance of the theory of capitalism; and why I felt that its revolutionary insights and program should be briefly summarized in the form of a manifesto addressed to all Americans who are concerned with the future of a democratic society, with the achievement of the fullest freedom and justice for all men, and, above all, with a twentieth-century reinterpretation of everyone’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In the twenty years or more in which I have been developing a theory of democracy as the only perfectly just form of government, I slowly came to realize that political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic
3
system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.
John Adams and Alexander Hamilton observed that a man who is dependent for his subsistence on the arbitrary will of an- other man is not economically free and so should not be admitted to citizenship because he cannot use the political liberty which be- longs to that status. If they had stated this point as a prediction, it would have been confirmed by later historic facts. The progressive political enfranchisement of the working classes has followed their progressive economic emancipation from slavery and serfdom, or from abject dependence on their employers.
As I first saw the problem, it came to this: What is the eco- nomic counterpart of political democracy? What type of economic organization is needed to support the institutions of a politically free society? The answer suggests itself at once, at least verbally: “economic democracy.” But we do not really have an answer unless we can give concrete meaning to those words.
We begin to form some notion of the economic counterpart of political democracy, or of the economic substructure needed to support free political institutions, when we recognize that it must involve two things: (1) economic liberty, i.e., the abolition of all eco- nomic slavery, servitude, or dependence; and (2) economic equality, i.e., the enjoyment by all men of the same economic status and, therewith, of the same opportunities to live well.
But what do we mean by the abolition of all forms of eco- nomic servitude or dependence? Certainly, that no man should work as a slave. But that by itself would hardly seem to be enough. In the whole of the pre-industrial past, economic freedom was thought to depend on the possession of sufficient property to en- able a man to obtain subsistence for himself and his family without recourse to grinding toil.
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In the oligarchical republics or feudal aristocracies of the past, the few who enjoyed the political freedom of citizenship or noble rank were always men of relatively independent means. The princi- ple of universal suffrage in our democratic republic now confers the political freedom of citizenship on all. If that is effective only when it is accompanied by economic freedom, are we called on to envisage a society in which all men will have the same kind of eco- nomic independence and security that only the few enjoyed in the past?
The question of what is meant by economic equality is even more difficult. We can be sure of only one thing. Economic equality cannot mean equality of possessions any more than political equality means equality of functions. Yet if we proceed by analogy with the ideal of political democracy, which we conceive as a politically classless society with a rotating aristocracy of leaders, we can at least surmise that an economic democracy must somehow be con- ceived as an economically classless society, and that, too, with a rotating aristocracy of managers.
Until very recently, as I thought about these questions, I had grave doubts that what has come to be called “capitalism” could establish the kind of economic democracy which political democ- racy required as its counterpart. I now understand the reasons for my doubts. They were based on an understanding of “capitalism” which was colored by the sound criticisms that had been leveled against its injustices and inequities, not only by Marx and Engels, and by socialists generally, but also by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, and by social philosophers or reformers as diverse as Alexis de Tocqueville, Horace Mann, Henry George, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, Jacques Maritain, Amintore Fan- fani, and Karl Polanyi. Of these, only Marx, Engels and their fol- lowers proposed communism as the remedy.
What all these men were criticizing was nineteenth-century capital- ism as it existed in England and the United States, the two countries in
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the world most advanced industrially. That nineteenth-century capitalism was unjust, no one can question. But there is a question as to whether nineteenth-century capitalism conforms to the idea or ideal of capitalism; and with this goes the question whether the historic injustices committed by the capitalism of the nineteenth century are historic accidents or are intrinsic to the very idea of capitalism itself.
Ten years ago, at a time when I did not understand the idea or ideal of capitalism as something quite different from what existed under that name in the nineteenth century, I naturally tended to suppose that the economic injustices perpetrated in the nineteenth century were intrinsic to capitalism. If that were so, then they could not be remedied without giving up capitalism itself, and finding some alternative to it—socialism, a co-operative system, a corpora- tive order, or something else.
In that state of mind, I was also bothered by the fact that the very expression I had been forced to use in order to give some meaning to economic democracy—the expression “classless soci- ety”—was the slogan and banner of the communists. The Commu- nist Manifesto called for the overthrow of the class-structured bour- geois society, divided into owners and workers, oppressors and oppressed, and set before men’s minds the ideal of a classless soci- ety, achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the state itself would be the sole owner of the means of produc- tion, and all men would be “equally liable to labor.”
I could not help agreeing with those who pointed out the fatal flaws in the communists’ revolutionary program. If men are de- pendent for their subsistence upon the arbitrary will of the state, or on that of its bureaucrats who manage the state-owned means of production, they are as unfree economically as when they are de- pendent upon the arbitrary will of private owners. Furthermore, “the equal liability of all to labor,” which is a basic principle in the communist program, impedes rather than promotes economic
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freedom. The communist classless society is, therefore, hardly the economic democracy we are looking for as the counterpart of po- litical democracy.
But while proponents of capitalism have argued against com- munism as the foe of political liberty and quality, they have not offered a positive program for establishing an economically class- less society. They have not countered the call for a communist revolution by proposing a capitalist revolution which, by carrying out the true principles of capitalism, would produce the economic democracy we need as the basis for political democracy.
One other fact obscured my understanding of the problem, or at least led me to consider a wrong solution of it. That was the ex- traordinary change which had taken place in the American econ- omy during my lifetime. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and running through all the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and his successors, Republican as well as De- mocratic, capitalism in twentieth-century America has undergone a remarkable transformation which puzzles many European observ- ers who cannot understand precisely how America has managed to remain a capitalist country, and yet has succeeded in avoiding the Marxist prediction that capitalism would be destroyed by its own imbalance between production and consumption. Or, to put it an- other way, they wonder whether capitalism in twentieth-century American is still capitalism in essence. They suspect that it is really one of the “many paths to socialism.”
This suspicion is not unfamiliar to Americans. Many of them, especially the most outspoken opponents of the New Deal, have voiced it themselves. They have deplored, again and again, the “creeping socialism” which has been eroding, if not overthrowing, the institutions and principles of capitalism. If the charge of creep- ing socialism is correct, then it can be argued that America has produced an economy which supports political democracy only by gradually, and perhaps self-deceptively, substituting socialist for
7
capitalist principles. What is true of America is also true of Eng- land, with a little less self-deception in the latter case.
To understand the charge of “creeping socialism,” one need only make a check-list out of the ten-point program which Marx and Engels proposed in 1848 and which they described as a way of making progressive “inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” The measures they proposed for “socializing” the economy by wresting “all capital from the bourgeoisie” and centralizing “all instruments of production in the hands of the State,” are as follows:
1. Abolitionofpropertyinlandandapplicationofallrentsof land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolitionofallrightofinheritance. 4. Confiscationofthepropertyofallemigrantsandrebels. 5. CentralizationofcreditinthehandsoftheState,bymeans
of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive mo-
nopoly. 6. Centralizationofthemeansofcommunicationandtrans-
port in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production
owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accor- dance with a common plan.
8. Equalliabilityofalltolabor.Establishmentofindustrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combinationofagriculturewithmanufacturingindustries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of population over the country.
8
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.
In his recent book, Contemporary Capitalism, John Strachey, the leading English Marxist, refers to the industrial economy of the mid-nineteenth century as “early stage capitalism.” That was capi- talism prior to political democracy, prior to the technological ad- vances which accelerated capitalization, and prior to the enactment, in whole or in part, of the revolutionary measures proposed by Marx and Engels.
Strachey refers to contemporary capitalism—the capitalism of England and the United States in the middle of the twentieth century—as “latest stage capitalism.” That is not only a technologically advanced economy with ever increasing accumulations of capital. It is not only a capitalistic system that is being operated by a democratic society. It is also, in Strachey’s judgment, a partly socialized capitalism which has been brought into being by the legislative enactment of much of the Marxist program and without the violent revolution Marx thought would be necessary. But in his view it is a revolution none- theless—a revolution still in process, the ultimate goal of which, ac- cording to his projection, is “last stage capitalism,” or the completely socialized industrial economy in which the State is the only capitalist.
Strachey’s account of what has happened in the last hundred years is not far from the truth. The radical differences he points out between “early stage” and “latest stage” capitalism are unques- tionable. His description of the present economy of England and the United States as partly socialized capitalism is accurate. But his notion that the process of socialization must be completed to re- move the inherent conflicts between capitalism and democracy is as wrong as it can be.
The socialization of the economy can be completed, according to Strachey, only when the abolition of private property in the
9
means of production replaces the present highly attenuated private ownership of capital. But when that happens, all capital property must be vested in the State; and then, as Milovan Djilas has pointed out, you have a new class of “owners”? the bureaucrats who form the managerial class in a totalitarian state. Djilas’s book, The New Class, offers irrefutable evidence that a completely social- ized economy, far from creating a free and classless society, creates one in which there is sharp class division between the rulers who are, in effect, the owners and the workers who are economically as well as politically enslaved. In the light of it, we can see clearly that it is socialism, not capitalism, which is essentially incompatible with democracy.
For many years I was prone to some of the errors and fallacies which blind socialists to the truth about capitalism and democracy. They are shared by many Americans, including our leading econo- mists, who, while they would not go as far as Strachey, nevertheless think that the progressive socialization of the economy during the last fifty years has been an advance toward the ideal of the democ- ratic society. It was precisely these errors in my own thinking which made me doubt that capitalism as such (i.e., not creeping socialism disguised as capitalism) could create the economic de- mocracy—the economically free and classless society—which would provide the very soil and atmosphere in which political de- mocracy can prosper.
These errors remained with me until I became acquainted with the thought of Louis Kelso. According to Mr. Kelso’s theory, capi- talism perfected in the line of its own principles, and without any admixture of socialism, can create the economically free and class- less society which will support political democracy and which, above all, will help us to preserve the institutions of a free society. In what we have become accustomed to call “the world-wide struggle for men’s minds,” this conception of capitalism offers the only real alternative to communism, for our partly socialized capi-
10
talism is an unstable mixture of conflicting principles, a halfway house from which we must go forward in one direction or the other.
No one with any sense of justice or devotion to democracy would wish to go back to capitalism in its original or primitive form. No one with any sense of the scientific-industrial revolution that is just beginning, and which will transform our society in the next hundred years, would regard our present partly capitalistic and partly socialistic arrangements as constituting a system that is capa- ble of maintaining itself statically in spite of its obviously unstable equilibrium between two opposing forces.
One is the tendency toward socialization and the attenuation of property rights in capital. The other is the effort to retain the ves- tiges of private property in capital. In one direction lies the goal of the socialist or communist revolution. In the other, by means of giving full strength to the rights of private property in capital while at the same time harmonizing those rights with the applicable prin- ciples of economic justice, lies the goal of the capitalist revolution.
The latter is clearly the better of the two revolutions, even if both, by virtue of technological advances administered for the wel- fare of all men, were able to achieve the same high standard of liv- ing for all. A high standard of living is at its best a plentiful subsis- tence, consisting of the comforts and conveniences of life. It does not by itself ensure freedom or the good life. It is compatible with slavery to a totalitarian State, and with subservience to the wrong ends.
There is all the difference in the world between a good living and living well. The goal of the capitalist revolution, as Mr. Kelso sees it, is not economic welfare as an end in itself, but rather the good human life for all. In achieving this end, the capitalist revolu- tion will not sacrifice freedom for welfare. It will secure liberty as well as equality for all men. It will subordinate economic to politi- cal activity—the management of things to the government of men.
11
Mr. Kelso gave me the opportunity to read the manuscript of a book about capitalism which he first drafted some ten years ago. In the last two years, I have had many conversations with him while he has been in the process of rewriting that book, which is now completed. In the course of these conversations, we have both come to see the broad philosophical and historical significance of the fundamental tenets of a sound theory of capitalism. It was with these discoveries in mind that I persuaded Louis Kelso to engage with me in the writing of THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO. The first part of this Manifesto explains the philosophical and historical
ideas that are involved in a sound understanding of the principles of capitalism and of the revolution to which those principles lead.
The second part sets forth a practical program which we be- lieve is a feasible way of accomplishing the capitalist revolution in the United States within the next fifty years. By making our society a pilot model of democratic capitalism we can also make the United States the world’s leader in the march toward freedom and justice for men everywhere.
San Francisco, February, 1958
Mortimer J. Adler
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PART ONE
THE IDEA OF THE
CAPITALIST REVOLUTION
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1 WHY A CAPITALIST MANIFESTO?
THEN AND NOW
In 1848, a world-shaking document, now known as the Communist Manifesto, sounded the call to overthrow primitive capitalism––a term we will define later. Actually, the title was Manifesto of the Com- munist Party. This fact is significant for the comparison we wish to draw between that manifesto and this one, which we hope will re- place it as a call to action.
Ours is not the manifesto of a revolutionary party dedicated to overthrowing the established order. It is instead a revolutionary manifesto which calls upon the American people as a whole to find in the established order the reasons for its renovation and the seeds of the better society we can develop. The end, at last in view, is that ideal society to which America has always been dedicated and toward which it has made great progress since its beginning.
THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO is intended to replace the Com- munist Manifesto as a call to action, first of all in our own country, and then, with our country’s leadership, everywhere else in the world. It is our industrial power and capital wealth, together with our institutions of political liberty and justice, that make America the place where the capitalist revolution must first take place to es- tablish economic liberty and justice for all.
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But while we intend this Manifesto for capitalism, to replace the earlier one against it, and while we have every reason to hope that the principles and program of this Manifesto can win the minds of thinking men, we cannot deceive ourselves that it will ever have the blind emotional appeal that made the earlier Manifesto so powerful a revolutionary force.
Perhaps a word should be said about our use of the words “capitalism” and “capitalist.” These words have different connota- tions for different people, as do “communism” and “communist.”
The unfortunate connotations of “capitalism” come from the widely prevalent habit of applying it to the kind of industrial econ- omy which flourished in England and the United States in the mid- dle of the nineteenth century, and which persisted with only minor modifications until the first decades of the twentieth. Almost eve- ryone agrees today that the economy needed to be reformed; and in consequence, many who approve of some or all of the economic reforms that have occurred in America in the last thirty years are apt to be sensitive to certain overtones that the word “capitalism” has in general usage.
Nevertheless, we feel that “capitalism” is the right word to use as the name for the ideally just organization of an industrial econ- omy. In later chapters we shall identify and name forms of capital- ism which are far from being embodiments of economic justice, among them not only nineteenth-century capitalism but also the kind of capitalism that exists at present in England and the United States, on the one hand, and the kind that exists in Soviet Russia, on the other.
It would be a mistake to relinquish the word “democracy” be- cause that word was used in the past for a form of government that was far from being just, as in the case of the slave societies of antiquity in which only a small portion of the population was ad- mitted to citizenship and granted the political rights to which all men are entitled as a matter of justice. We think it would be a mis-
15
take of the same sort to relinquish the word “capitalism.” As we employ the name “democracy” for the just polity that has only re- cently begun to exist, so we should employ the name “capitalism” for the just economy that can be brought into existence. To bring that about is the objective of the capitalist revolution.
THE PREVAILING SENSE OF WELL-BEING
We are initially addressing ourselves to Americans––to men who feel well-off––and not to the starving, downtrodden victims of in- justice and oppression. We cannot exhort them to engage in vio- lence, and to do so without fear because they have nothing to lose but their chains. We must persuade them, in much calmer tones than that, to act rationally, with insight and prudence, because they do have something to lose––their freedom––which an abundance of creature comforts may have lulled them into forgetting.
Men who think they already have all the liberty and justice they can expect, in addition to plenty of material goods, cannot be emo- tionally exhorted to take radical measures for the improvement of their society. They can only be asked to think again.
We might properly begin THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO with the statement that the specter of communism is still haunting Eu- rope and the world. Such a declaration should strike terror in the hearts of Americans. But most Americans have been rendered im- pervious to it by the pervasive feeling that it cannot happen here. Most of us do not realize that something approaching it has already happened here, and that if we continue along the paths we have taken in the last thirty years, we can go even further in the wrong direction. Again, it is our general sense of well-being that prevents us from realizing what has happened to us and what threatens to happen.
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When the Communist Manifesto first announced that the specter of communism was haunting Europe, that society as a whole was split into two great hostile camps––the owners of capital and the employers of labor, on the one hand; and the propertyless workers, or proletariat, on the other. Marx and Engels admired the power of capital. “The bourgeoisie,” they asserted, “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” But they deplored the consequences of the power wielded by the owners of capital.
Capital property was owned by less than one-tenth of the pop- ulation, under whose tyrannical will the remaining nine-tenths lived like slaves. Hence the authors of the Communist Manifesto called for the transfer of all private property in capital instruments to the State, where it would be administered––they claimed––for the benefit of all men.
Let us now consider the situation in America today and the condition of those to whom THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO is ad- dressed. This manifesto is written in an atmosphere that is not merely free from the starvation and degradation of the masses, but in which almost the whole of society is enjoying the highest stan- dard of material well-being ever known to a nation or to any sig- nificant number of individuals. Not only do we have high wages and full employment, but so great an opportunity for employment that a proportion of wives and mothers higher than ever before can find jobs in commerce and industry, in many cases to raise even higher an already high family standard of living. Largely through the efforts of labor unions, heavily fortified by legislation born during the Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties, the gen- eral hours of employment have been reduced again and again, until today few people regularly work more than forty hours a week. Some industries are already stabilized at thirty-six hours a week, and the leaders of the great union, the AFL-CIO, are already talk-
17
ing seriously about the thirty-hour week, the regular month-long vacation, the periodic three-month vacation, and more holidays.
The general talk about “American Capitalism,” “Modern Capi- talism,” or “People’s Capitalism” pictures something that looks like the very opposite of nineteenth-century capitalism as described by Marx and Engels. On all sides we hear that this current brand of capitalism is something entirely new in the last three decades, and that it fulfills the promise of a high standard of living for all, a high degree of freedom from toil for all, and the most generous measure of personal freedom for all. The secret formula of this happy state of affairs we attribute in large measure to the intellect of John May- nard Keynes. The principal parts of the formula can be stated as follows:
1.
2. 3.
Massconsumptionisnecessaryifallmembersofasocietyare to have a high standard of living. What is more significant, mass consumption is necessary to support mass production in an industrial economy.
But mass consumption cannot exist or continue unless there is a mass distribution of purchasing power.
The proper method of creating a mass distribution of pur- chasing power is mass employment: i.e., “full employment” or the employment of every person who would like to be em- ployed.
4. Sinceprosperityandwell-beingdependuponthesuccessfuldis- tribution of purchasing power, this can be achieved through progressively raising, by union pressure and legislation, wages, social security payments, unemployment compensation, agri- cultural and other prices; and through the free use of income taxing power and other powers of government to promote full employment.
By the Employment Act of 1946, we have adopted a national policy of maximum employment.
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At last we seem almost on the verge of feeling that we can cope with that nightmare of an industrial economy––the depression.
In short, capitalism, once denounced as exploiting and op- pressing the worker, seems to have evolved into a system which provides the benefits once claimed for socialism, but without––it is believed––the loss of freedom that inheres in socialism.
The good life for the worker seems to have been discovered in America. Justice seems to have reformed and made decent the once pitiless primitive capitalistic economy.
OUR MACHINE-PRODUCED HAPPINESS
The cause of this felicitous state of affairs, we are told, is the ever increasing use of ever more efficient capital instruments. These tend constantly and endlessly to raise the “productivity of labor,” and thus account for an ever increasing output of goods and ser- vices per worker employed. The principal guide to management and labor in negotiating these perpetually increasing wages is that “wage increases and benefits should be consistent with productiv- ity prospects and with the maintenance of a stable dollar.”1
Labor leaders are in full agreement with this principle. They openly and frankly support technological advances which in turn raise the “productivity of labor,” which in turn calls for increases in wages to provide the mass purchasing power to support the mass production, etc.2
1 Economic Report of the President, 1957, p. 3. 2 See Philip Murray, Annual Report, 14th Constitutional Convention, C.I.O., 1952 (reprinted in Supplement to The People Shall Judge, Chicago, 1956). See also hear- ings before the Subcommittee on Economic Stabilization of the Joint Economic Committee on Automation and Technological Change, 1955: pp. 120, 220, 234, 287, 337, 419, 455, 463.
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The net result of all this, and of the general progress of scien- tific development in and for industry, is that the rate oftechnologi- cal advance is accelerating. Instead of finding ourselves confronted with a point of diminishing returns, we find that this happy state of affairs promises to get happier as we make more and more techno- logical progress, to which there is no end in sight.
No specter can threaten us while we are under the care of our guardian angel––our modern capitalistic economy!
OUR FEELING ABOUT SOCIALISM
In addition to the general sense of well-being that we all share and attribute to our form of capitalism, we are united in our feeling about socialism. As a people, we dislike it and rule it out as an ac- ceptable alternative to capitalism.
It is all but universally agreed in the United States that social- ism is the antitheses of the American way, that it infringes on hu- man freedom, and that it should be avoided at all costs.
It is recognized––sometimes articulately, sometimes only intui- tively––that the combination of economic power and political power in the hands of government officials is the very opposite of the American principle of the separation of powers and of our sys- tem of checks and balances. It is widely felt that such fusion of po- litical and economic power, which inevitably results when the same bureaucracy not only runs the political machinery of the state but also wields the economic power that is inherent in the state’s own- ership of industry, leads to the destruction of individual liberties. It is generally thought that individual freedom and private property are inseparably connected.
Our sense of the undesirability of socialism and our rejection of it as the antithesis of the American way of life adds to our satis-
20
faction with the new capitalistic economy we have developed. By creating purchasing power to provide full employment, a satisfac- tory standard of living for all households, and high incomes for city dwellers as well as for farmers, we seem to have accomplished all that could be desired and, once and for all, to have discredited so- cialism as a remedy for the ills and instability of the modern indus- trial economy.
THE AMBUSH
With this economic paradise at hand, why would anyone have the audacity, the ingratitude, or the effrontery to call for the renovation of our society by a capitalist revolution?
A memorial to the new capitalism? Yes. A guidebook to ex- plain its inner secrets to the uninitiated? Yes. But why a revolution- ary manifesto?
Our answer is: To point out that while no specter is haunting America, socialism in a variety of ways is coming in by the back door; to explain that capitalism––”pure capitalism” or capitalism unmixed with socialism––is the only economic system compatible with political democracy; and to show not only that we are a long way from having such an economic system, but also that we have not yet become clear about the principles of such a system.
The picture of accomplished politico-economic perfection is an illusion. What has been acclaimed as American Capitalism, Modern Capitalism, or People’s Capitalism is a mixture of capitalism and so- cialism. If the process of socialization is carried forward with the tremendous technological advances now impending, we will be brought closer and closer to complete socialism, i.e., State capital- ism. Nothing can stop this process except the capitalist revolution.
21
What appears to be the increasing productiveness of labor is not the increasing productiveness of labor but the increasing pro- ductiveness of capital.
What appears to be the preservation of private property in the means of production, particularly in the capital wealth of corpora- tions, is characterized by only a fraction of the rights that would justify its being called private property.
What appears to be justice in the distribution of incomes is in fact gross injustice.
What promises to free men from unnecessary toil is of such a nature that it must unavoidably saddle them with unnecessary toil.
What seems at first glance to be an economic order consistent with the American system of separated and balanced powers, as the most dependable safeguard of human freedom, is in fact creat- ing a centralization of power that would have brought our ances- tors to arms.
Though it is fashionable today to believe that we are advancing toward a sound capitalism, an understanding of the principles of capitalism will disclose that we are retreating from it and, instead, advancing toward a socialist state.
Never before has a society marched more joyously into am- bush by the very forces it implacably opposes but does not recog- nize. We are faced with the spectacle of a nation sincerely seeking democracy and economic justice through means which it fails to recognize as destructive of both.
That is why we think a capitalist manifesto is in order. It is to clear up this case of mistaken identity that we wish to re-examine the nature of economic freedom, private property, justice in distri- bution, industrial production, and economic democracy. And, to supplement this, we will propose a series of wholly feasible changes, which we believe should be brought about to set our soci-
22
ety on the course toward the fully developed capitalism that is the counterpart of political democracy.
AN APPEAL TO REASON
We have called this brief statement of theory and this outline of practical proposals a Manifesto because we think the occasion calls for a public declaration of the principles of “pure capitalism” and of a program which is calculated to achieve it.
The principles of capitalism have heretofore been seen only fragmentarily and in a confused manner. In their simplicity, they are applicable only to a mature industrial economy. Only in an economy which produces the preponderant portion of its goods and services by capital instruments, and which is well enough equipped with such capital instruments to produce and enjoy a high standard of living, can the truth as well as the feasibility of capitalistic economy be readily seen.
To grasp the truth of these principles, and to understand their consequences, requires careful, sustained, rational thought. The only appeal this Manifesto makes is an appeal for such thought about the problems we face.
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2 ECONOMIC FREEDOM : PROPERTY AND LEISURE
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM
In all the slave societies of the past, human beings were divided into two classes. On the one hand, there were the owners of prop- erty––in land, animals, slaves, raw material and tools. They were the masters and as such they were economically free men. On the other hand, there were the toilers who had no property of the aforementioned sort. They were the slaves, men without any eco- nomic freedom.
Aristotle distinguished between two types of slavery: (1) the chattel slavery of those who were the property of other men and so were totally deprived of property, even of property in their own labor power; and (2) what he called the “special and separate slav- ery”1 of the meaner sort of artisan or mechanic who had no prop- erty beyond his own labor power and so was forced to lead a ser- vile life.
1 Politics, Book I, Ch. 13, 1260b1-2.
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What is true of the chattel slaves and servile artisans of ancient Greece and Rome is essentially true of the serfs in the agrarian economies of feudal Europe, and of the wage slaves who formed the industrial proletariat in the middle of the nineteenth century. At no time in the past were the working masses economically free men. Nor, until the power of organized labor gave them some measure of the economic independence which property in capital always bestowed on the leisure class, were they admitted to suf- frage and the political freedom of a voice in their own government.
Before the rise of industrial production and organized labor, the members of the ruling class were for the most part identical with the members of the leisure class. This is true of colonial America and of the first decades of our republic as well as of the republics of ancient Greece and Rome. The men of property were economically free men. Because they had through property a free- dom which they wished to protect, they strove to safeguard it with the rights and privileges of political status and power. Their eco- nomic freedom was the basis of their claim to political liberty.
But their economic freedom was also the basis of their oppor- tunity to lead a human as opposed to a subhuman life. In all the pre-industrial societies of the past, this opportunity was open only to those who could engage in the liberal activities of leisure be- cause they obtained all they needed for subsistence and comfort from income-bearing property other than their own labor power.
To understand this, let us contrast the condition of the slave with that of the economically free man. We shall see that there are three elements in economic freedom, the most significant of which is freedom from toil or freedom for leisure. This is indis- pensable to leading a free, as opposed to a servile, life. The slave not only lacked such freedom, but also the economic independ- ence and security without which political liberty cannot be effec- tively employed or enjoyed.
In the following threefold contrast between the conditions of economic slavery and freedom, the word “slave” is used in the
25
broadest sense to cover not only men who belong to other men as their private chattels, but also all who are forced by lack of prop- erty to lead servile or subhuman lives.
1. Theslavewasamanwhoworkedforthegoodorprofitofan- other man, and worked as an instrument or tool of that other man as well as in his interests. He was exploited in the sense that the fruits of his labor were alienated from his good to that of another. In contrast, the economically free man engaged in no activity in which he served as the instrument of another man, and did nothing which served any good except his own or the common good of his society.
2. Theslavewasamanwhowasdependentforhissubsistenceon the arbitrary will of another man, his master. In this condition, he was always threatened with economic destitution–– starvation or worse. He had no economic security or freedom from want. In contrast, the master as an owner of property was an economically independent man. This is not to say that any man is ever wholly secure from misfortune. Since wealth is among the goods of fortune, it is always subject to accidents. But allowing for accidents, the economically free man is one who has enough property to be free from want without greater dependence on other men than they have upon him, and to be relatively secure against the threat of destitution.
3. Theslavewasamanwhospentmostofhistimeandenergyin toil. Toil for him began in childhood and ended with his death, usually an early one; and it occupied almost all of his waking life, seven days a week. What time was left he needed for sleep and other basic biological functions in order to keep alive. In contrast, the man who obtained all the subsistence he needed, or much more than that, from the use of his property, including the labor of his slaves, had economic freedom in the most important sense of this term: freedom from toil. Only when such freedom is added to freedom from want, insecurity, or destitution––and to freedom from exploitation by another and from dependence on the arbi-
26
trary will of another––do we approach the ideal of liberty in the economic sphere of human life.
These three contrasts between the condition of masters and the condition of slaves, as men who are and are not economically free, can be summarized by the antithesis Aristotle draws between the servile and the free life. Some men, according to Aristotle, merely subsist; others are able, beyond subsistence, to live well, i.e., to en- gage in leisure activities.2 The servile life consists in nothing but toil in order to subsist. Men who have the misfortune of being chattels or of being propertyless are forced to lead a servile life––a life of toil, insecurity, and dependence.
Of course, some men who are fortunate enough to have suffi- cient property to live well actually degrade themselves to the level of the servile life by using all their time and energy in accumulating wealth and even by engaging in toil to do so. While men without property cannot live well, not all men with property do live well, but only those who, understanding the difference between labor and leisure, direct their activities to the goals of the free life.3
2 Aristotle describes the occupation of virtuous men of property in the following manner: “Those who are in a position which places them above toil have stew- ards who attend to their households while they occupy themselves with philoso- phy and politics” (Politics, Book 1, Ch. 7, 1225b35-38). In this passage, the words “philosophy” and “politics” are shorthand for all the activities of leisure– engagement in the liberal arts and sciences and occupation with the institutions and processes of society.
3 Distinguishing between two kinds of wealth getting, Aristotle says that “accu- mulation is the end in the one case, but there is a further end in the other. Hence some persons are led to believe that getting wealth is the object of household management, and the whole idea of their lives is that they ought either to in- crease their money, or at any rate not to lose it. The origin of this disposition in men,” he declares, “is that they are intent upon living only, and not upon living well” (Politics, Book 1, Ch. 9, 1257b35-1258a2).
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LABOR, LEISURE AND FREEDOM
The distinction between labor and leisure is generally misunder- stood in twentieth-century America. Leisure is misconceived as idleness, vacationing (which involves “vacancy”), play, recreation, relaxation, diversion, amusement and so on. If leisure were that, it would never have been regarded by anyone except a child or a childish adult as something morally better than socially useful work.
The misconception of leisure arises from the fact that it in- volves free time––time that is free from the biological necessity of sleep, and of labor to obtain the means of subsistence. Such time can, of course, be filled in various ways: with amusements and di- versions of all sorts, or with the intrinsically virtuous activities by which men pursue happiness and serve the common good of their society. Leisure, properly conceived as the main content of a free, as opposed to a servile, life, consists in activities which are neither toil nor play, but are rather the expressions of moral and intellec- tual virtue––the things a good man does because they are intrinsi- cally good for him and for his society, making him better as a man and advancing the civilization in which he lives.
In all the pre-industrial societies of the past, when only a few were exempt from grinding toil, the activities of leisure were as sharply distinguished from indulgence in amusements or recrea- tions as they were from the drudgery of toil. Husbandmen, crafts- men, and laborers of all sorts provided society with its means of subsistence and its material comforts. They had little or no time free for leisure or for play. Ample free time belonged only to those who obtained their subsistence from the property they owned and the labor of others. If these men had frittered away their free time in frivolity and play, the civilization to which we are the heirs would never have been produced; for civilization, as opposed to subsistence, is produced by those who have free time and use it creatively––to develop the liberal arts and sciences and all the insti- tutions of the state and of religion.
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Play, like sleep, washes away the fatigues and tensions that re- sult from the serious occupations of life, all the forms of labor which produce the goods of subsistence and all the leisure activities which produce the goods of civilization. Play and sleep, as Aristotle pointed out, are for the sake of these serious and socially useful occupations. Since the activities of leisure can be as exacting and tiring as the activities of toil, some form of relaxation, whether sleep or play or both, is required by those who work productively.4
As play is for the sake of work, so subsistence work is for the sake of leisure activity. To confuse leisure either with idleness or amusement is to invert the order of goods which gave moral sig- nificance to the class divisions in all the pre-industrial societies of the past. Those among our ancestors who were men of virtue as well as men of property would find it difficult to understand how any self-respecting man could regard indulgence in amusements as the goal of life. They looked upon the labor of slaves and artisans as the means which provided them with the opportunity to engage in leisure, not in play. To expect the masses to labor from dawn to dusk and throughout life so that a small class of men could waste their free time in idleness, amusement, or sport would express, in their view, a degree of childishness or immorality that could be found only in the most depraved or vicious members of their class.5
4 See Aristotle’s Politics, Book VII, Chs. 9, 14 and 15; Book VIII, Ch. 3.
5 When, in 1825, the journeymen carpenters of Boston struck for higher wages and shorter hours, the master carpenters, their employers, replied that “the measures proposed [were] calculated to exert a very unhappy influence on our apprentices––by seducing them from that course of industry and economy of time to which we are anxious to inure them.” They also maintained “that it will expose the journeymen themselves to many temptations and improvident prac- tices from which they are happily secure,” adding “that we consider idleness as the most deadly bane to useful and honorable living.” They were supported in this by the “gentlemen engaged in building,” who did not regard their own free time as an occasion for vice. Two years later when a strike of journeyman car- penters in Philadelphia led to a city-wide federation of labor unions, the Pream- ble of the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations declared that they were
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Since the confusion of leisure with idleness or amusement is rampant in our industrial society, when, for the first time in history, it has become possible for all men to have enough free time to en- gage in leisure, it may be difficult for our contemporaries to under- stand that labor and leisure are the two main forms of human work, and that the first is for the sake of the second. Unless they do un- derstand this, however, they will not see the ultimate moral signifi- cance of the capitalist revolution. It may increase human freedom and strengthen the institutions of a free society, but freedom itself is only a means. Freedom can be squandered and perverted as well as put to good use.
Only if freedom from labor becomes freedom for leisure will the capitalist revolution produce a better civilization than any so far achieved, and one in the production of which all men will partici- pate. Only if men thus use their opportunity for leisure will the capitalist revolution result in an improvement of human life itself, and not merely in its external conditions or institutions. As labor is for the sake of leisure, so freedom and justice for all are the institu- tional means whereby the good life that was enjoyed by the few alone in the pre-industrial aristocracies of the past will be open to all men in the capitalistic democracies of the future.6
placed “in a situation of such unceasing exertion and servility as must necessar- ily, in time, render the benefits of our liberal institutions to us inaccessible and useless.” They looked to the progressive shortening of the working day as the means whereby all the useful members of the community would gradually come to possess “a due and full proportion of that invaluable promoter of happiness, leisure” (reprinted in The People Shall Judge, Chicago, 1953: Vol. 1, pp. 580-583).
6 Sleep, play, toil, and leisure represent diverse goods in human life. But they do not have the same moral value. As contrasted with idleness, indolence, or the wanton waste of human time and energy, sleep and play contribute to human well-being. But they contribute less than productive toil and leisure. All the goods that contribute positively to human well-being must be sought in the pur- suit of happiness, but they must be sought in the right order and proportion. A man defeats himself in the pursuit of happiness if he places the goods of the body above the goods of the soul, or if he plays so much in his free time that he has little time left for leisure.
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The current misuse of the word “leisure” requires us to find other words for expressing the basic distinction which is so essen- tial to the understanding of the capitalist revolution. We may not always be able to avoid using that word, but at least we can try to correct misunderstanding by the employment of other words or phrases for expressing its meaning.
It may be helpful to observe that where Aristotle drew a sharp line between labor and leisure, Adam Smith made the same distinc- tion in human activities by drawing an equally sharp line between what he called “productive labor” and “non-productive labor.” His use of the word “labor” shows that he had socially useful work in mind in both cases, and not idleness or play. By “non-productive labor,” he meant the activities of the clergy, statesmen, philoso- phers, scientists, artists, teachers, physicians and lawyers. He called these activities “labor” because, like the forms of work that are productive of wealth, they are not playful but serious, and serve a socially useful purpose. And he called such labor “non-productive” because, unlike other forms of work, the socially useful purpose they serve is not the production of wealth or the goods of bodily subsistence, but the production of civilization, or the goods of the human spirit.
We think it is better to use the term “work” for both forms of activity. We shall speak of “subsistence work” when we mean the activities that are productive of wealth (i.e., the necessities, com- forts and conveniences of life); and we shall speak of “liberal work” or “leisure work” when we mean the activities that are pro- ductive of the goods of civilization (i.e., the liberal arts and sci- ences, the institutions of the state and of religion).
Whenever we revert to the use of the words “labor” and “lei- sure” without qualification, we hope it will be understood that la- bor is identical with subsistence work and leisure with liberal work. The fact that leisure is equated with one of the two principal forms of human work should help to prevent anyone from con- fusing it with play or idleness. The fact that the goods which it produces are so different from the goods produced by subsistence
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work should also help to preserve the distinction between labor and leisure, which is so necessary for all that follows.
THE FORM AND CHARACTER OF HUMAN WORK
So far we have distinguished two main forms of human work solely by reference to what they produce, or the ends they serve: on the one hand, the goods of the body, the biological goods of subsistence, the necessities, comforts and conveniences of life; on the other hand, the goods of the soul, the goods of civilization or of the human spirit, such things as the arts and sciences, the insti- tutions of the state and of religion.
Work can be differentiated by reference to its human quality as well as by reference to its end or purpose.
Certain forms of work are mechanical in quality. They involve repetitive, routine operations which call for little or no creative in- telligence upon the part of the worker. They also involve bodily exertion, or at least some manual dexterity; but it is the mechanical character of the task to be performed, not the physical character of the performance, which makes such work stultifying.
The materials on which the worker operates, but not his own nature, are improved by his efforts. After he has acquired the minimum skill required for doing it, he learns nothing more. He may increase the store of useful goods in the world, but he does not himself grow in stature as a man.
The Greek word banausia expressed the degrading quality of the mechanical work done by slaves––the dullness of the repeti- tive which is most intense in the kind of toil we call “drudgery.” Because of its repetitiveness, the person who is engaged in it does not grow mentally, morally, or spiritually. On the contrary, drudg- ery stunts growth.
Because it is intrinsically unrewarding, such work must be ex- trinsically compensated. It is done under compulsion––the need for subsistence. Anyone who could secure his subsistence from
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other sources would try to avoid it, or do as little of it as possible. Hence such work is normally done for extrinsic compensation of some sort, whether in the shape of immediately consumable goods, or wages, or the meager subsistence meted out to a slave.
At the opposite extreme from work that is mechanical in qual- ity as well as done to produce and obtain subsistence, there is work that is creative in quality as well as liberal in the end at which it aims. All leisure activities constitute work of this sort. The creative aspect of such work is signified by the Greek word for leisure, which was scholé. Like our English word “school,” it connotes learning––mental, moral, or spiritual growth.
Such work is, therefore, intrinsically rewarding. It is something which every man should, and any virtuous man would, do for its own sake. If he has sufficient property to secure for himself and his family a sufficiency of the means of subsistence, the virtuous man gladly engages in liberal work without extrinsic compensation. Like virtue itself, such work is its own reward.
We have just seen that the forms of human work can be differ- entiated by reference to their human quality, or the effect they have on the worker, as well as differentiated by reference to the goods they produce for society as a whole. We must now observe that these distinctions can be compounded.
At one extreme in the scale of human work, certain socially useful activities combine having the production of wealth as their aim with being mechanical in quality. At the opposite extreme are the highest activities of leisure, which combine being creative in quality with having as their aim the production of the goods of civilization and of the human spirit. In between these extremes, there are the mixed forms of work: on the one hand, subsistence work which, while it aims at the production of wealth, is creative rather than mechanical in quality; on the other hand, work which, while mechanical in quality, nevertheless serves a purpose which is identical with the aim of liberal work.
This fourfold division of the kinds of work is of critical signifi- cance when we come subsequently to consider the variety of tasks
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to be performed in our modern industrial society. For the present, we shall use it in order to call attention to a widely prevalent mis- understanding about the dignity of human work.
In the ancient world––in fact, in all the pre-industrial societies of the past––no one made the mistake of supposing that equal dig- nity attaches to all human activity. Human dignity was thought to reside primarilyinthoseactivitieswhicharespecificallyorcharac- teristically human, i.e., activities which have no counterpart what- soever in the life of brute animals or in the operations of machines.
Brutes as well as men struggle for subsistence. Though the subsistence activities of b rutes are largely instinctive, while those of men usually involve some employment of intelligence or reason, the goal or end of such activities is the same in both cases. Human life has its distinctive worth or dignity only insofar as it rises above biological activities and involves activities which are not performed by brutes, or at least not performed in the same way.
Man’s special dignity lies in goods which no other animal shares with him at all, as other animals share with him the goods of food, shelter, and even those of sleep and play. Hence man has no special dignity as a producer of subsistence or wealth, but only as a user of wealth for the sake of specifically liberal activities produc- tive of the goods of the spirit and of civilization.
It follows, therefore, that the only dignity there is in working to produce subsistence comes from such creative use of intelligence or reason as may be involved in the performance of tasks that are nonmechanical in quality. Even so, they have less dignity than nonmechanical or creative work which is liberal in its aim. Work which is not only mechanical in quality but also has the production of subsistence as its only aim is lowest in the scale. Such dignity as attaches to any work productive of subsistence, whether mechani- cal or creative, derives from the fact that the production of wealth, rightly understood, serves to support the leisure activities that con- stitute the dignity of human life.
It may be thought that St. Paul preaches a Christian message to the contrary when he says of those who do not work, neither shall
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they eat. But it should be remembered, in the first place, that the toil by which man eats in the sweat of his face is a punishment for sin, not an honor or a blessing. And, in the second place, it should be observed that the word St. Paul uses, in making this remark, means any form of socially useful activity, and not labor in the nar- row sense of toil for the sake of subsistence .7 What he is saying, in short, is that all men are under a moral obligation not just to work for a living, but to work in order to deserve a living. In the Chris- tian sense, those who, having the means of subsistence, do not try to live well by doing liberal work enjoy a living they do not deserve.
THE IMAGE OF AN ECONOMICALLY FREE SOCIETY
So far we have seen how the life of a master in a slave society con- tains all the elements of economic freedom, and therewith the op- portunities for leading a good life, which he will use well only if he is a man of virtue.
The possession of sufficient productive capital property en- ables a man to be economically free, but by itself it cannot make him lead a free and liberal life rather than a life devoted to the pro- duction or consumption of subsistence. He may engage in toil or trade even if he does not have to, because he does not have the virtue to rise above it; or, worse than that, he may squander his time and energies in indolence, or in pastimes which, no matter how innocuous, corrupt him precisely because he has elevated them to the level of ends. It should be added that pastimes seldom remain innocuous when they have to fill most of a man’s waking time.
In the pre-industrial aristocracies of the past, only the fortunate few possessed all the elements of economic freedom; and of these, fewer still––those who were virtuous as well as fortunate–– employed that freedom to do the work of leisure to the benefit of themselves and their society. These advantages were bought at the
7 See Jacques Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World, New York, 1936: p. 59.
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terrible price of slavery and misery for the masses who toiled not merely for their own meager subsistence, but to provide the wealth that supported the pursuit of happiness and the development of civilization by those who had economic freedom and used it well.
Freedom built upon slavery, the leisure of a privileged class supported by the unremitting toil of the masses, the opportunity for the few to lead a decent human life as the flower of a civiliza- tion whose roots lay in the submerged and subhuman lives of the toiling masses––this was the accepted order in all the class-divided societies of the pre-industrial past.
We now know what our ancestors did not know: that, under conditions of industrial production, and with the promise of capi- talism fulfilled, it is possible for a whole society to be economically free and for all men to have the opportunity to live like human be- ings.
From the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Jews, and the Greeks down to the middle of the nineteenth century, or even to the end of it, it was generally supposed that slavery, or the equivalent of it in grinding toil and drudgery, was the necessary price that mankind had to pay for the advancement of civilization itself, as contrasted with the static and rudimentary culture of primitive life. If all men had to work for a living, that is, if every one had to spend most of his time in subsistence work in order to support himself and his family, no one would be left free for leisure or nonsubsistence work––the liberal work of civilization itself.
Prior to the industrial revolution, it was almost impossible to conceive a practicable division of labor which, while securing enough wealth to provide the means of liberal work as well as sub- sistence for a whole society, would also permit all members of the society to engage in liberal activities as well as in subsistence work. The only practical solution seemed to be slavery or slave labor in one form or another. The enslavement of the many, in lives occu- pied almost entirely with toil, emancipated the few for the pursuits of civilization. Prior to this century, the achievements of Western civilization––all its fine arts, pure sciences, all its political and reli-
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gious institutions––were the product of the liberal work done by the virtuous members of its leisure class, just as obviously as all its economic crafts and goods were the product of the subsistence work done by its toiling masses.
We said a moment ago that no one prior to our own time could conceive of any practical solution other than one which in- volved slavery, or at least a life for the masses devoted to the me- chanical work of producing subsistence, upon which all men might live and some might, in addition, live well. This amounts to saying that no one could conceive an economically free society, i.e., an eco- nomically classless society in which all men, not just a few, would be economically free and would live like human beings if they were virtuous enough to use their economic freedom well. The state- ment is literally true if by “conceive” we mean thinking out in de- tail a practicable plan for the economic organization of a society that would make all its members economically free.
But one man, more than 2,300 years ago, was able to imagine, even if he could not practically conceive, an economically free so- ciety. His was the kind of fantasy that it takes a genius to dream. Though it was only a dream for him, the image he conjured up is no dream for us. It is the quite practicable ideal of a classless soci- ety of economically free men, with slavery or its equivalents abol- ished, and with the mechanical work of producing subsistence re- duced to a minimum for all.
Though Aristotle did not and could not dream up the capitalist revolution in concrete practical terms, he did, in a single sentence, imagine a possibility that capitalism, and capitalism alone, can real- ize. He said:
If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others . . . if the shuttle could weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief work- men would not want servants, nor masters slaves.8
8 Politics, Book 1, Ch. 4, 1253b34-1254a1. This passage occurs in the context of a statement to the effect that “instruments are of various sorts; some are living,
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Since we are dealing with a dream, let us indulge ourselves in one more moment of dreaming. In that single sentence, Aristotle projected in his imagination a society which has gone beyond the industrial revolution to a state of complete automation: a thorough substitution of automatic machines for slaves, i.e., for human be- ings doing subsistence work of a purely mechanical sort.
It is important to realize that machines can be substituted for men only where men perform tasks that are mechanical in quality; i.e., repetitive tasks performed by rote or rule, and without any in- volvement at all of creative thought. What men do mechanically, machines can do as well, and usually much better. The task (for example, extended calculation) may be mechanical, even though the end for which it is performed is liberal.
With this clearly in mind, we can see that the dream of complete automation envisages all work that is mechanical in quality (whether or not its end is subsistence) being done by automatic machines, including the production of the machines themselves. The invention or improvement of these machines and the man- agement of the productive processes in which they are engaged is work that aims at the production of subsistence, but it is liberal in character. Though its end is subsistence, it is creative; being non- mechanical, it cannot be done by machines. In our dream of com- plete automation, we must, therefore, be careful to exclude the technical work involved in the invention or improvement of ma- chines, and the managerial work involved in the organization and administration of the productive process as a whole.
Even with these two significant exclusions in the sphere of subsistence work, we know that complete automation is impossible, but we also know that within the next hundred years progressively
others lifeless; in the rudder, the pilot of a ship has a lifeless, in the look-out man, a living instrument; for in the arts the servant is a kind of instrument . . . [An economic] possession is an instrument for maintaining life. And so, in the arrangement of the family, a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant is himself an instrument which takes prece- dence over all other instruments” (ibid., 1253b27-33).
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increasing automation will achieve a remarkable approximation of the dream. Hence, by analyzing the dream as if it were real, we can learn something about an ideal that it will be practicable for us to realize approximately.
Let us, then, for one more moment of projection, imagine a society in which machines do all or most of the mechanical work that must be done to provide the wealth necessary both for subsis- tence and for civilization. Let us imagine, further, that in this soci- ety, every man, or every family, has a sufficient share in the private ownership of machines to derive sufficient subsistence from their productivity. In this automated industrial society, each man, as an owner of machines, would be in the same position as an owner of slaves in a slave society. As a capitalist, he would be an economi- cally free man, free from exploitation by other men, free from des- titution or want, free from the drudgery of mechanical work––and so free to live well if he has the virtue to do so.9
Such a society would be a truly classless society, and the very opposite of the class-divided society of the socialist state, in which a despotic bureaucracy constitutes a ruling and owning class as
9 The conception of the machine as an inanimate slave is a familiar thought in our industrial society. But the implications of this idea are seldom, if ever, fol- lowed through to their ultimate conclusion, which is that, like the few who were slave owners in the past, it is now possible for all men to be economically free by acquiring property in the automated machine slaves of the future. On the one hand, Norman Thomas, writing of the future of socialism, says, “Socialism be- lieves that men may be free by making power-driven machinery the slave of mankind” (After the New Deal, What?, New York, 1936: p. 157). But in spite of the fact that the economically free men of the past derived their freedom from owning capital, often including slaves, Thomas as a socialist believes that univer- sal freedom––economic independence and security for all––can be achieved without the private ownership of capital. On the other hand, in a recent speech, Roger Blough, Chairman of the Board of the United States Steel Corporation, cites a reference by the London Economist to machines as “inanimate slaves.” He recommends multiplying them in order to produce more and to distribute more widely the greater wealth produced in the form of a higher standard of living for all; but he does not implement and expand this recommendation by proposing to make all men free by diffusing as widely as possible the individual and private ownership of our inanimate slaves.
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against the mass of the workers who have no economic independ- ence or any effective political power. Even were we to accept at its face value the claim that the dictatorship of the proletariat creates a “classless society,” it would be a classless society of propertyless workers. In contrast, the classless society of capitalism, the image of which we have projected from Aristotle’s extraordinary fantasy, would be a classless society of masters not slaves, of propertied men able to enjoy leisure, not of propertyless men still engaged in toil.
Such a classless society fulfills the ideal of economic democ- racy. All its members would be economically free and equal, even as in a political democracy all men enjoy political freedom and equality. Just as the status of citizenship conferred upon all has achieved political democracy, so the individual and private owner- ship of capital by all households would achieve economic democ- racy.
This ideal can become a practical reality to whatever extent an actual society is able (1) to reduce human toil to the minimum through a proper use of automation; (2) to approximate a universal diffusion of private property in the capital instruments of produc- tion; and (3) to educate its members to devote themselves not only to the wise management and productive use of their productive property, but also to the pursuits of leisure and the production of the goods of civilization.
המשך יבוא.
by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler
AS PUBLISHED BY
RANDOM HOUSE
New York
1958
© Copyright, 2000, by Patricia H. Kelso.
All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copy- right Conventions.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-5268
Published in San Francisco and simultaneously on the Internet by the Kelso Institute.
www.kelsoinstitute.org
2
PREFACE
While signing my name to THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO as coau- thor with Louis Kelso, I wish to disclaim any credit for the original and basic theory of capitalism on which this Manifesto is based. That theory is entirely Mr. Kelso’s. It is the product of many years of inquiry and thought on his part. The full statement of it will soon be published in Capitalism, of which Mr. Kelso is sole author.
I would also like to explain how I came to appreciate the criti- cal importance of the theory of capitalism; and why I felt that its revolutionary insights and program should be briefly summarized in the form of a manifesto addressed to all Americans who are concerned with the future of a democratic society, with the achievement of the fullest freedom and justice for all men, and, above all, with a twentieth-century reinterpretation of everyone’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In the twenty years or more in which I have been developing a theory of democracy as the only perfectly just form of government, I slowly came to realize that political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic
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system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.
John Adams and Alexander Hamilton observed that a man who is dependent for his subsistence on the arbitrary will of an- other man is not economically free and so should not be admitted to citizenship because he cannot use the political liberty which be- longs to that status. If they had stated this point as a prediction, it would have been confirmed by later historic facts. The progressive political enfranchisement of the working classes has followed their progressive economic emancipation from slavery and serfdom, or from abject dependence on their employers.
As I first saw the problem, it came to this: What is the eco- nomic counterpart of political democracy? What type of economic organization is needed to support the institutions of a politically free society? The answer suggests itself at once, at least verbally: “economic democracy.” But we do not really have an answer unless we can give concrete meaning to those words.
We begin to form some notion of the economic counterpart of political democracy, or of the economic substructure needed to support free political institutions, when we recognize that it must involve two things: (1) economic liberty, i.e., the abolition of all eco- nomic slavery, servitude, or dependence; and (2) economic equality, i.e., the enjoyment by all men of the same economic status and, therewith, of the same opportunities to live well.
But what do we mean by the abolition of all forms of eco- nomic servitude or dependence? Certainly, that no man should work as a slave. But that by itself would hardly seem to be enough. In the whole of the pre-industrial past, economic freedom was thought to depend on the possession of sufficient property to en- able a man to obtain subsistence for himself and his family without recourse to grinding toil.
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In the oligarchical republics or feudal aristocracies of the past, the few who enjoyed the political freedom of citizenship or noble rank were always men of relatively independent means. The princi- ple of universal suffrage in our democratic republic now confers the political freedom of citizenship on all. If that is effective only when it is accompanied by economic freedom, are we called on to envisage a society in which all men will have the same kind of eco- nomic independence and security that only the few enjoyed in the past?
The question of what is meant by economic equality is even more difficult. We can be sure of only one thing. Economic equality cannot mean equality of possessions any more than political equality means equality of functions. Yet if we proceed by analogy with the ideal of political democracy, which we conceive as a politically classless society with a rotating aristocracy of leaders, we can at least surmise that an economic democracy must somehow be con- ceived as an economically classless society, and that, too, with a rotating aristocracy of managers.
Until very recently, as I thought about these questions, I had grave doubts that what has come to be called “capitalism” could establish the kind of economic democracy which political democ- racy required as its counterpart. I now understand the reasons for my doubts. They were based on an understanding of “capitalism” which was colored by the sound criticisms that had been leveled against its injustices and inequities, not only by Marx and Engels, and by socialists generally, but also by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, and by social philosophers or reformers as diverse as Alexis de Tocqueville, Horace Mann, Henry George, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, Jacques Maritain, Amintore Fan- fani, and Karl Polanyi. Of these, only Marx, Engels and their fol- lowers proposed communism as the remedy.
What all these men were criticizing was nineteenth-century capital- ism as it existed in England and the United States, the two countries in
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the world most advanced industrially. That nineteenth-century capitalism was unjust, no one can question. But there is a question as to whether nineteenth-century capitalism conforms to the idea or ideal of capitalism; and with this goes the question whether the historic injustices committed by the capitalism of the nineteenth century are historic accidents or are intrinsic to the very idea of capitalism itself.
Ten years ago, at a time when I did not understand the idea or ideal of capitalism as something quite different from what existed under that name in the nineteenth century, I naturally tended to suppose that the economic injustices perpetrated in the nineteenth century were intrinsic to capitalism. If that were so, then they could not be remedied without giving up capitalism itself, and finding some alternative to it—socialism, a co-operative system, a corpora- tive order, or something else.
In that state of mind, I was also bothered by the fact that the very expression I had been forced to use in order to give some meaning to economic democracy—the expression “classless soci- ety”—was the slogan and banner of the communists. The Commu- nist Manifesto called for the overthrow of the class-structured bour- geois society, divided into owners and workers, oppressors and oppressed, and set before men’s minds the ideal of a classless soci- ety, achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the state itself would be the sole owner of the means of produc- tion, and all men would be “equally liable to labor.”
I could not help agreeing with those who pointed out the fatal flaws in the communists’ revolutionary program. If men are de- pendent for their subsistence upon the arbitrary will of the state, or on that of its bureaucrats who manage the state-owned means of production, they are as unfree economically as when they are de- pendent upon the arbitrary will of private owners. Furthermore, “the equal liability of all to labor,” which is a basic principle in the communist program, impedes rather than promotes economic
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freedom. The communist classless society is, therefore, hardly the economic democracy we are looking for as the counterpart of po- litical democracy.
But while proponents of capitalism have argued against com- munism as the foe of political liberty and quality, they have not offered a positive program for establishing an economically class- less society. They have not countered the call for a communist revolution by proposing a capitalist revolution which, by carrying out the true principles of capitalism, would produce the economic democracy we need as the basis for political democracy.
One other fact obscured my understanding of the problem, or at least led me to consider a wrong solution of it. That was the ex- traordinary change which had taken place in the American econ- omy during my lifetime. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and running through all the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and his successors, Republican as well as De- mocratic, capitalism in twentieth-century America has undergone a remarkable transformation which puzzles many European observ- ers who cannot understand precisely how America has managed to remain a capitalist country, and yet has succeeded in avoiding the Marxist prediction that capitalism would be destroyed by its own imbalance between production and consumption. Or, to put it an- other way, they wonder whether capitalism in twentieth-century American is still capitalism in essence. They suspect that it is really one of the “many paths to socialism.”
This suspicion is not unfamiliar to Americans. Many of them, especially the most outspoken opponents of the New Deal, have voiced it themselves. They have deplored, again and again, the “creeping socialism” which has been eroding, if not overthrowing, the institutions and principles of capitalism. If the charge of creep- ing socialism is correct, then it can be argued that America has produced an economy which supports political democracy only by gradually, and perhaps self-deceptively, substituting socialist for
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capitalist principles. What is true of America is also true of Eng- land, with a little less self-deception in the latter case.
To understand the charge of “creeping socialism,” one need only make a check-list out of the ten-point program which Marx and Engels proposed in 1848 and which they described as a way of making progressive “inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” The measures they proposed for “socializing” the economy by wresting “all capital from the bourgeoisie” and centralizing “all instruments of production in the hands of the State,” are as follows:
1. Abolitionofpropertyinlandandapplicationofallrentsof land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolitionofallrightofinheritance. 4. Confiscationofthepropertyofallemigrantsandrebels. 5. CentralizationofcreditinthehandsoftheState,bymeans
of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive mo-
nopoly. 6. Centralizationofthemeansofcommunicationandtrans-
port in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production
owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accor- dance with a common plan.
8. Equalliabilityofalltolabor.Establishmentofindustrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combinationofagriculturewithmanufacturingindustries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of population over the country.
8
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.
In his recent book, Contemporary Capitalism, John Strachey, the leading English Marxist, refers to the industrial economy of the mid-nineteenth century as “early stage capitalism.” That was capi- talism prior to political democracy, prior to the technological ad- vances which accelerated capitalization, and prior to the enactment, in whole or in part, of the revolutionary measures proposed by Marx and Engels.
Strachey refers to contemporary capitalism—the capitalism of England and the United States in the middle of the twentieth century—as “latest stage capitalism.” That is not only a technologically advanced economy with ever increasing accumulations of capital. It is not only a capitalistic system that is being operated by a democratic society. It is also, in Strachey’s judgment, a partly socialized capitalism which has been brought into being by the legislative enactment of much of the Marxist program and without the violent revolution Marx thought would be necessary. But in his view it is a revolution none- theless—a revolution still in process, the ultimate goal of which, ac- cording to his projection, is “last stage capitalism,” or the completely socialized industrial economy in which the State is the only capitalist.
Strachey’s account of what has happened in the last hundred years is not far from the truth. The radical differences he points out between “early stage” and “latest stage” capitalism are unques- tionable. His description of the present economy of England and the United States as partly socialized capitalism is accurate. But his notion that the process of socialization must be completed to re- move the inherent conflicts between capitalism and democracy is as wrong as it can be.
The socialization of the economy can be completed, according to Strachey, only when the abolition of private property in the
9
means of production replaces the present highly attenuated private ownership of capital. But when that happens, all capital property must be vested in the State; and then, as Milovan Djilas has pointed out, you have a new class of “owners”? the bureaucrats who form the managerial class in a totalitarian state. Djilas’s book, The New Class, offers irrefutable evidence that a completely social- ized economy, far from creating a free and classless society, creates one in which there is sharp class division between the rulers who are, in effect, the owners and the workers who are economically as well as politically enslaved. In the light of it, we can see clearly that it is socialism, not capitalism, which is essentially incompatible with democracy.
For many years I was prone to some of the errors and fallacies which blind socialists to the truth about capitalism and democracy. They are shared by many Americans, including our leading econo- mists, who, while they would not go as far as Strachey, nevertheless think that the progressive socialization of the economy during the last fifty years has been an advance toward the ideal of the democ- ratic society. It was precisely these errors in my own thinking which made me doubt that capitalism as such (i.e., not creeping socialism disguised as capitalism) could create the economic de- mocracy—the economically free and classless society—which would provide the very soil and atmosphere in which political de- mocracy can prosper.
These errors remained with me until I became acquainted with the thought of Louis Kelso. According to Mr. Kelso’s theory, capi- talism perfected in the line of its own principles, and without any admixture of socialism, can create the economically free and class- less society which will support political democracy and which, above all, will help us to preserve the institutions of a free society. In what we have become accustomed to call “the world-wide struggle for men’s minds,” this conception of capitalism offers the only real alternative to communism, for our partly socialized capi-
10
talism is an unstable mixture of conflicting principles, a halfway house from which we must go forward in one direction or the other.
No one with any sense of justice or devotion to democracy would wish to go back to capitalism in its original or primitive form. No one with any sense of the scientific-industrial revolution that is just beginning, and which will transform our society in the next hundred years, would regard our present partly capitalistic and partly socialistic arrangements as constituting a system that is capa- ble of maintaining itself statically in spite of its obviously unstable equilibrium between two opposing forces.
One is the tendency toward socialization and the attenuation of property rights in capital. The other is the effort to retain the ves- tiges of private property in capital. In one direction lies the goal of the socialist or communist revolution. In the other, by means of giving full strength to the rights of private property in capital while at the same time harmonizing those rights with the applicable prin- ciples of economic justice, lies the goal of the capitalist revolution.
The latter is clearly the better of the two revolutions, even if both, by virtue of technological advances administered for the wel- fare of all men, were able to achieve the same high standard of liv- ing for all. A high standard of living is at its best a plentiful subsis- tence, consisting of the comforts and conveniences of life. It does not by itself ensure freedom or the good life. It is compatible with slavery to a totalitarian State, and with subservience to the wrong ends.
There is all the difference in the world between a good living and living well. The goal of the capitalist revolution, as Mr. Kelso sees it, is not economic welfare as an end in itself, but rather the good human life for all. In achieving this end, the capitalist revolu- tion will not sacrifice freedom for welfare. It will secure liberty as well as equality for all men. It will subordinate economic to politi- cal activity—the management of things to the government of men.
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Mr. Kelso gave me the opportunity to read the manuscript of a book about capitalism which he first drafted some ten years ago. In the last two years, I have had many conversations with him while he has been in the process of rewriting that book, which is now completed. In the course of these conversations, we have both come to see the broad philosophical and historical significance of the fundamental tenets of a sound theory of capitalism. It was with these discoveries in mind that I persuaded Louis Kelso to engage with me in the writing of THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO. The first part of this Manifesto explains the philosophical and historical
ideas that are involved in a sound understanding of the principles of capitalism and of the revolution to which those principles lead.
The second part sets forth a practical program which we be- lieve is a feasible way of accomplishing the capitalist revolution in the United States within the next fifty years. By making our society a pilot model of democratic capitalism we can also make the United States the world’s leader in the march toward freedom and justice for men everywhere.
San Francisco, February, 1958
Mortimer J. Adler
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PART ONE
THE IDEA OF THE
CAPITALIST REVOLUTION
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1 WHY A CAPITALIST MANIFESTO?
THEN AND NOW
In 1848, a world-shaking document, now known as the Communist Manifesto, sounded the call to overthrow primitive capitalism––a term we will define later. Actually, the title was Manifesto of the Com- munist Party. This fact is significant for the comparison we wish to draw between that manifesto and this one, which we hope will re- place it as a call to action.
Ours is not the manifesto of a revolutionary party dedicated to overthrowing the established order. It is instead a revolutionary manifesto which calls upon the American people as a whole to find in the established order the reasons for its renovation and the seeds of the better society we can develop. The end, at last in view, is that ideal society to which America has always been dedicated and toward which it has made great progress since its beginning.
THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO is intended to replace the Com- munist Manifesto as a call to action, first of all in our own country, and then, with our country’s leadership, everywhere else in the world. It is our industrial power and capital wealth, together with our institutions of political liberty and justice, that make America the place where the capitalist revolution must first take place to es- tablish economic liberty and justice for all.
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But while we intend this Manifesto for capitalism, to replace the earlier one against it, and while we have every reason to hope that the principles and program of this Manifesto can win the minds of thinking men, we cannot deceive ourselves that it will ever have the blind emotional appeal that made the earlier Manifesto so powerful a revolutionary force.
Perhaps a word should be said about our use of the words “capitalism” and “capitalist.” These words have different connota- tions for different people, as do “communism” and “communist.”
The unfortunate connotations of “capitalism” come from the widely prevalent habit of applying it to the kind of industrial econ- omy which flourished in England and the United States in the mid- dle of the nineteenth century, and which persisted with only minor modifications until the first decades of the twentieth. Almost eve- ryone agrees today that the economy needed to be reformed; and in consequence, many who approve of some or all of the economic reforms that have occurred in America in the last thirty years are apt to be sensitive to certain overtones that the word “capitalism” has in general usage.
Nevertheless, we feel that “capitalism” is the right word to use as the name for the ideally just organization of an industrial econ- omy. In later chapters we shall identify and name forms of capital- ism which are far from being embodiments of economic justice, among them not only nineteenth-century capitalism but also the kind of capitalism that exists at present in England and the United States, on the one hand, and the kind that exists in Soviet Russia, on the other.
It would be a mistake to relinquish the word “democracy” be- cause that word was used in the past for a form of government that was far from being just, as in the case of the slave societies of antiquity in which only a small portion of the population was ad- mitted to citizenship and granted the political rights to which all men are entitled as a matter of justice. We think it would be a mis-
15
take of the same sort to relinquish the word “capitalism.” As we employ the name “democracy” for the just polity that has only re- cently begun to exist, so we should employ the name “capitalism” for the just economy that can be brought into existence. To bring that about is the objective of the capitalist revolution.
THE PREVAILING SENSE OF WELL-BEING
We are initially addressing ourselves to Americans––to men who feel well-off––and not to the starving, downtrodden victims of in- justice and oppression. We cannot exhort them to engage in vio- lence, and to do so without fear because they have nothing to lose but their chains. We must persuade them, in much calmer tones than that, to act rationally, with insight and prudence, because they do have something to lose––their freedom––which an abundance of creature comforts may have lulled them into forgetting.
Men who think they already have all the liberty and justice they can expect, in addition to plenty of material goods, cannot be emo- tionally exhorted to take radical measures for the improvement of their society. They can only be asked to think again.
We might properly begin THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO with the statement that the specter of communism is still haunting Eu- rope and the world. Such a declaration should strike terror in the hearts of Americans. But most Americans have been rendered im- pervious to it by the pervasive feeling that it cannot happen here. Most of us do not realize that something approaching it has already happened here, and that if we continue along the paths we have taken in the last thirty years, we can go even further in the wrong direction. Again, it is our general sense of well-being that prevents us from realizing what has happened to us and what threatens to happen.
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When the Communist Manifesto first announced that the specter of communism was haunting Europe, that society as a whole was split into two great hostile camps––the owners of capital and the employers of labor, on the one hand; and the propertyless workers, or proletariat, on the other. Marx and Engels admired the power of capital. “The bourgeoisie,” they asserted, “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” But they deplored the consequences of the power wielded by the owners of capital.
Capital property was owned by less than one-tenth of the pop- ulation, under whose tyrannical will the remaining nine-tenths lived like slaves. Hence the authors of the Communist Manifesto called for the transfer of all private property in capital instruments to the State, where it would be administered––they claimed––for the benefit of all men.
Let us now consider the situation in America today and the condition of those to whom THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO is ad- dressed. This manifesto is written in an atmosphere that is not merely free from the starvation and degradation of the masses, but in which almost the whole of society is enjoying the highest stan- dard of material well-being ever known to a nation or to any sig- nificant number of individuals. Not only do we have high wages and full employment, but so great an opportunity for employment that a proportion of wives and mothers higher than ever before can find jobs in commerce and industry, in many cases to raise even higher an already high family standard of living. Largely through the efforts of labor unions, heavily fortified by legislation born during the Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties, the gen- eral hours of employment have been reduced again and again, until today few people regularly work more than forty hours a week. Some industries are already stabilized at thirty-six hours a week, and the leaders of the great union, the AFL-CIO, are already talk-
17
ing seriously about the thirty-hour week, the regular month-long vacation, the periodic three-month vacation, and more holidays.
The general talk about “American Capitalism,” “Modern Capi- talism,” or “People’s Capitalism” pictures something that looks like the very opposite of nineteenth-century capitalism as described by Marx and Engels. On all sides we hear that this current brand of capitalism is something entirely new in the last three decades, and that it fulfills the promise of a high standard of living for all, a high degree of freedom from toil for all, and the most generous measure of personal freedom for all. The secret formula of this happy state of affairs we attribute in large measure to the intellect of John May- nard Keynes. The principal parts of the formula can be stated as follows:
1.
2. 3.
Massconsumptionisnecessaryifallmembersofasocietyare to have a high standard of living. What is more significant, mass consumption is necessary to support mass production in an industrial economy.
But mass consumption cannot exist or continue unless there is a mass distribution of purchasing power.
The proper method of creating a mass distribution of pur- chasing power is mass employment: i.e., “full employment” or the employment of every person who would like to be em- ployed.
4. Sinceprosperityandwell-beingdependuponthesuccessfuldis- tribution of purchasing power, this can be achieved through progressively raising, by union pressure and legislation, wages, social security payments, unemployment compensation, agri- cultural and other prices; and through the free use of income taxing power and other powers of government to promote full employment.
By the Employment Act of 1946, we have adopted a national policy of maximum employment.
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At last we seem almost on the verge of feeling that we can cope with that nightmare of an industrial economy––the depression.
In short, capitalism, once denounced as exploiting and op- pressing the worker, seems to have evolved into a system which provides the benefits once claimed for socialism, but without––it is believed––the loss of freedom that inheres in socialism.
The good life for the worker seems to have been discovered in America. Justice seems to have reformed and made decent the once pitiless primitive capitalistic economy.
OUR MACHINE-PRODUCED HAPPINESS
The cause of this felicitous state of affairs, we are told, is the ever increasing use of ever more efficient capital instruments. These tend constantly and endlessly to raise the “productivity of labor,” and thus account for an ever increasing output of goods and ser- vices per worker employed. The principal guide to management and labor in negotiating these perpetually increasing wages is that “wage increases and benefits should be consistent with productiv- ity prospects and with the maintenance of a stable dollar.”1
Labor leaders are in full agreement with this principle. They openly and frankly support technological advances which in turn raise the “productivity of labor,” which in turn calls for increases in wages to provide the mass purchasing power to support the mass production, etc.2
1 Economic Report of the President, 1957, p. 3. 2 See Philip Murray, Annual Report, 14th Constitutional Convention, C.I.O., 1952 (reprinted in Supplement to The People Shall Judge, Chicago, 1956). See also hear- ings before the Subcommittee on Economic Stabilization of the Joint Economic Committee on Automation and Technological Change, 1955: pp. 120, 220, 234, 287, 337, 419, 455, 463.
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The net result of all this, and of the general progress of scien- tific development in and for industry, is that the rate oftechnologi- cal advance is accelerating. Instead of finding ourselves confronted with a point of diminishing returns, we find that this happy state of affairs promises to get happier as we make more and more techno- logical progress, to which there is no end in sight.
No specter can threaten us while we are under the care of our guardian angel––our modern capitalistic economy!
OUR FEELING ABOUT SOCIALISM
In addition to the general sense of well-being that we all share and attribute to our form of capitalism, we are united in our feeling about socialism. As a people, we dislike it and rule it out as an ac- ceptable alternative to capitalism.
It is all but universally agreed in the United States that social- ism is the antitheses of the American way, that it infringes on hu- man freedom, and that it should be avoided at all costs.
It is recognized––sometimes articulately, sometimes only intui- tively––that the combination of economic power and political power in the hands of government officials is the very opposite of the American principle of the separation of powers and of our sys- tem of checks and balances. It is widely felt that such fusion of po- litical and economic power, which inevitably results when the same bureaucracy not only runs the political machinery of the state but also wields the economic power that is inherent in the state’s own- ership of industry, leads to the destruction of individual liberties. It is generally thought that individual freedom and private property are inseparably connected.
Our sense of the undesirability of socialism and our rejection of it as the antithesis of the American way of life adds to our satis-
20
faction with the new capitalistic economy we have developed. By creating purchasing power to provide full employment, a satisfac- tory standard of living for all households, and high incomes for city dwellers as well as for farmers, we seem to have accomplished all that could be desired and, once and for all, to have discredited so- cialism as a remedy for the ills and instability of the modern indus- trial economy.
THE AMBUSH
With this economic paradise at hand, why would anyone have the audacity, the ingratitude, or the effrontery to call for the renovation of our society by a capitalist revolution?
A memorial to the new capitalism? Yes. A guidebook to ex- plain its inner secrets to the uninitiated? Yes. But why a revolution- ary manifesto?
Our answer is: To point out that while no specter is haunting America, socialism in a variety of ways is coming in by the back door; to explain that capitalism––”pure capitalism” or capitalism unmixed with socialism––is the only economic system compatible with political democracy; and to show not only that we are a long way from having such an economic system, but also that we have not yet become clear about the principles of such a system.
The picture of accomplished politico-economic perfection is an illusion. What has been acclaimed as American Capitalism, Modern Capitalism, or People’s Capitalism is a mixture of capitalism and so- cialism. If the process of socialization is carried forward with the tremendous technological advances now impending, we will be brought closer and closer to complete socialism, i.e., State capital- ism. Nothing can stop this process except the capitalist revolution.
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What appears to be the increasing productiveness of labor is not the increasing productiveness of labor but the increasing pro- ductiveness of capital.
What appears to be the preservation of private property in the means of production, particularly in the capital wealth of corpora- tions, is characterized by only a fraction of the rights that would justify its being called private property.
What appears to be justice in the distribution of incomes is in fact gross injustice.
What promises to free men from unnecessary toil is of such a nature that it must unavoidably saddle them with unnecessary toil.
What seems at first glance to be an economic order consistent with the American system of separated and balanced powers, as the most dependable safeguard of human freedom, is in fact creat- ing a centralization of power that would have brought our ances- tors to arms.
Though it is fashionable today to believe that we are advancing toward a sound capitalism, an understanding of the principles of capitalism will disclose that we are retreating from it and, instead, advancing toward a socialist state.
Never before has a society marched more joyously into am- bush by the very forces it implacably opposes but does not recog- nize. We are faced with the spectacle of a nation sincerely seeking democracy and economic justice through means which it fails to recognize as destructive of both.
That is why we think a capitalist manifesto is in order. It is to clear up this case of mistaken identity that we wish to re-examine the nature of economic freedom, private property, justice in distri- bution, industrial production, and economic democracy. And, to supplement this, we will propose a series of wholly feasible changes, which we believe should be brought about to set our soci-
22
ety on the course toward the fully developed capitalism that is the counterpart of political democracy.
AN APPEAL TO REASON
We have called this brief statement of theory and this outline of practical proposals a Manifesto because we think the occasion calls for a public declaration of the principles of “pure capitalism” and of a program which is calculated to achieve it.
The principles of capitalism have heretofore been seen only fragmentarily and in a confused manner. In their simplicity, they are applicable only to a mature industrial economy. Only in an economy which produces the preponderant portion of its goods and services by capital instruments, and which is well enough equipped with such capital instruments to produce and enjoy a high standard of living, can the truth as well as the feasibility of capitalistic economy be readily seen.
To grasp the truth of these principles, and to understand their consequences, requires careful, sustained, rational thought. The only appeal this Manifesto makes is an appeal for such thought about the problems we face.
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2 ECONOMIC FREEDOM : PROPERTY AND LEISURE
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM
In all the slave societies of the past, human beings were divided into two classes. On the one hand, there were the owners of prop- erty––in land, animals, slaves, raw material and tools. They were the masters and as such they were economically free men. On the other hand, there were the toilers who had no property of the aforementioned sort. They were the slaves, men without any eco- nomic freedom.
Aristotle distinguished between two types of slavery: (1) the chattel slavery of those who were the property of other men and so were totally deprived of property, even of property in their own labor power; and (2) what he called the “special and separate slav- ery”1 of the meaner sort of artisan or mechanic who had no prop- erty beyond his own labor power and so was forced to lead a ser- vile life.
1 Politics, Book I, Ch. 13, 1260b1-2.
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What is true of the chattel slaves and servile artisans of ancient Greece and Rome is essentially true of the serfs in the agrarian economies of feudal Europe, and of the wage slaves who formed the industrial proletariat in the middle of the nineteenth century. At no time in the past were the working masses economically free men. Nor, until the power of organized labor gave them some measure of the economic independence which property in capital always bestowed on the leisure class, were they admitted to suf- frage and the political freedom of a voice in their own government.
Before the rise of industrial production and organized labor, the members of the ruling class were for the most part identical with the members of the leisure class. This is true of colonial America and of the first decades of our republic as well as of the republics of ancient Greece and Rome. The men of property were economically free men. Because they had through property a free- dom which they wished to protect, they strove to safeguard it with the rights and privileges of political status and power. Their eco- nomic freedom was the basis of their claim to political liberty.
But their economic freedom was also the basis of their oppor- tunity to lead a human as opposed to a subhuman life. In all the pre-industrial societies of the past, this opportunity was open only to those who could engage in the liberal activities of leisure be- cause they obtained all they needed for subsistence and comfort from income-bearing property other than their own labor power.
To understand this, let us contrast the condition of the slave with that of the economically free man. We shall see that there are three elements in economic freedom, the most significant of which is freedom from toil or freedom for leisure. This is indis- pensable to leading a free, as opposed to a servile, life. The slave not only lacked such freedom, but also the economic independ- ence and security without which political liberty cannot be effec- tively employed or enjoyed.
In the following threefold contrast between the conditions of economic slavery and freedom, the word “slave” is used in the
25
broadest sense to cover not only men who belong to other men as their private chattels, but also all who are forced by lack of prop- erty to lead servile or subhuman lives.
1. Theslavewasamanwhoworkedforthegoodorprofitofan- other man, and worked as an instrument or tool of that other man as well as in his interests. He was exploited in the sense that the fruits of his labor were alienated from his good to that of another. In contrast, the economically free man engaged in no activity in which he served as the instrument of another man, and did nothing which served any good except his own or the common good of his society.
2. Theslavewasamanwhowasdependentforhissubsistenceon the arbitrary will of another man, his master. In this condition, he was always threatened with economic destitution–– starvation or worse. He had no economic security or freedom from want. In contrast, the master as an owner of property was an economically independent man. This is not to say that any man is ever wholly secure from misfortune. Since wealth is among the goods of fortune, it is always subject to accidents. But allowing for accidents, the economically free man is one who has enough property to be free from want without greater dependence on other men than they have upon him, and to be relatively secure against the threat of destitution.
3. Theslavewasamanwhospentmostofhistimeandenergyin toil. Toil for him began in childhood and ended with his death, usually an early one; and it occupied almost all of his waking life, seven days a week. What time was left he needed for sleep and other basic biological functions in order to keep alive. In contrast, the man who obtained all the subsistence he needed, or much more than that, from the use of his property, including the labor of his slaves, had economic freedom in the most important sense of this term: freedom from toil. Only when such freedom is added to freedom from want, insecurity, or destitution––and to freedom from exploitation by another and from dependence on the arbi-
26
trary will of another––do we approach the ideal of liberty in the economic sphere of human life.
These three contrasts between the condition of masters and the condition of slaves, as men who are and are not economically free, can be summarized by the antithesis Aristotle draws between the servile and the free life. Some men, according to Aristotle, merely subsist; others are able, beyond subsistence, to live well, i.e., to en- gage in leisure activities.2 The servile life consists in nothing but toil in order to subsist. Men who have the misfortune of being chattels or of being propertyless are forced to lead a servile life––a life of toil, insecurity, and dependence.
Of course, some men who are fortunate enough to have suffi- cient property to live well actually degrade themselves to the level of the servile life by using all their time and energy in accumulating wealth and even by engaging in toil to do so. While men without property cannot live well, not all men with property do live well, but only those who, understanding the difference between labor and leisure, direct their activities to the goals of the free life.3
2 Aristotle describes the occupation of virtuous men of property in the following manner: “Those who are in a position which places them above toil have stew- ards who attend to their households while they occupy themselves with philoso- phy and politics” (Politics, Book 1, Ch. 7, 1225b35-38). In this passage, the words “philosophy” and “politics” are shorthand for all the activities of leisure– engagement in the liberal arts and sciences and occupation with the institutions and processes of society.
3 Distinguishing between two kinds of wealth getting, Aristotle says that “accu- mulation is the end in the one case, but there is a further end in the other. Hence some persons are led to believe that getting wealth is the object of household management, and the whole idea of their lives is that they ought either to in- crease their money, or at any rate not to lose it. The origin of this disposition in men,” he declares, “is that they are intent upon living only, and not upon living well” (Politics, Book 1, Ch. 9, 1257b35-1258a2).
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LABOR, LEISURE AND FREEDOM
The distinction between labor and leisure is generally misunder- stood in twentieth-century America. Leisure is misconceived as idleness, vacationing (which involves “vacancy”), play, recreation, relaxation, diversion, amusement and so on. If leisure were that, it would never have been regarded by anyone except a child or a childish adult as something morally better than socially useful work.
The misconception of leisure arises from the fact that it in- volves free time––time that is free from the biological necessity of sleep, and of labor to obtain the means of subsistence. Such time can, of course, be filled in various ways: with amusements and di- versions of all sorts, or with the intrinsically virtuous activities by which men pursue happiness and serve the common good of their society. Leisure, properly conceived as the main content of a free, as opposed to a servile, life, consists in activities which are neither toil nor play, but are rather the expressions of moral and intellec- tual virtue––the things a good man does because they are intrinsi- cally good for him and for his society, making him better as a man and advancing the civilization in which he lives.
In all the pre-industrial societies of the past, when only a few were exempt from grinding toil, the activities of leisure were as sharply distinguished from indulgence in amusements or recrea- tions as they were from the drudgery of toil. Husbandmen, crafts- men, and laborers of all sorts provided society with its means of subsistence and its material comforts. They had little or no time free for leisure or for play. Ample free time belonged only to those who obtained their subsistence from the property they owned and the labor of others. If these men had frittered away their free time in frivolity and play, the civilization to which we are the heirs would never have been produced; for civilization, as opposed to subsistence, is produced by those who have free time and use it creatively––to develop the liberal arts and sciences and all the insti- tutions of the state and of religion.
28
Play, like sleep, washes away the fatigues and tensions that re- sult from the serious occupations of life, all the forms of labor which produce the goods of subsistence and all the leisure activities which produce the goods of civilization. Play and sleep, as Aristotle pointed out, are for the sake of these serious and socially useful occupations. Since the activities of leisure can be as exacting and tiring as the activities of toil, some form of relaxation, whether sleep or play or both, is required by those who work productively.4
As play is for the sake of work, so subsistence work is for the sake of leisure activity. To confuse leisure either with idleness or amusement is to invert the order of goods which gave moral sig- nificance to the class divisions in all the pre-industrial societies of the past. Those among our ancestors who were men of virtue as well as men of property would find it difficult to understand how any self-respecting man could regard indulgence in amusements as the goal of life. They looked upon the labor of slaves and artisans as the means which provided them with the opportunity to engage in leisure, not in play. To expect the masses to labor from dawn to dusk and throughout life so that a small class of men could waste their free time in idleness, amusement, or sport would express, in their view, a degree of childishness or immorality that could be found only in the most depraved or vicious members of their class.5
4 See Aristotle’s Politics, Book VII, Chs. 9, 14 and 15; Book VIII, Ch. 3.
5 When, in 1825, the journeymen carpenters of Boston struck for higher wages and shorter hours, the master carpenters, their employers, replied that “the measures proposed [were] calculated to exert a very unhappy influence on our apprentices––by seducing them from that course of industry and economy of time to which we are anxious to inure them.” They also maintained “that it will expose the journeymen themselves to many temptations and improvident prac- tices from which they are happily secure,” adding “that we consider idleness as the most deadly bane to useful and honorable living.” They were supported in this by the “gentlemen engaged in building,” who did not regard their own free time as an occasion for vice. Two years later when a strike of journeyman car- penters in Philadelphia led to a city-wide federation of labor unions, the Pream- ble of the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations declared that they were
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Since the confusion of leisure with idleness or amusement is rampant in our industrial society, when, for the first time in history, it has become possible for all men to have enough free time to en- gage in leisure, it may be difficult for our contemporaries to under- stand that labor and leisure are the two main forms of human work, and that the first is for the sake of the second. Unless they do un- derstand this, however, they will not see the ultimate moral signifi- cance of the capitalist revolution. It may increase human freedom and strengthen the institutions of a free society, but freedom itself is only a means. Freedom can be squandered and perverted as well as put to good use.
Only if freedom from labor becomes freedom for leisure will the capitalist revolution produce a better civilization than any so far achieved, and one in the production of which all men will partici- pate. Only if men thus use their opportunity for leisure will the capitalist revolution result in an improvement of human life itself, and not merely in its external conditions or institutions. As labor is for the sake of leisure, so freedom and justice for all are the institu- tional means whereby the good life that was enjoyed by the few alone in the pre-industrial aristocracies of the past will be open to all men in the capitalistic democracies of the future.6
placed “in a situation of such unceasing exertion and servility as must necessar- ily, in time, render the benefits of our liberal institutions to us inaccessible and useless.” They looked to the progressive shortening of the working day as the means whereby all the useful members of the community would gradually come to possess “a due and full proportion of that invaluable promoter of happiness, leisure” (reprinted in The People Shall Judge, Chicago, 1953: Vol. 1, pp. 580-583).
6 Sleep, play, toil, and leisure represent diverse goods in human life. But they do not have the same moral value. As contrasted with idleness, indolence, or the wanton waste of human time and energy, sleep and play contribute to human well-being. But they contribute less than productive toil and leisure. All the goods that contribute positively to human well-being must be sought in the pur- suit of happiness, but they must be sought in the right order and proportion. A man defeats himself in the pursuit of happiness if he places the goods of the body above the goods of the soul, or if he plays so much in his free time that he has little time left for leisure.
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The current misuse of the word “leisure” requires us to find other words for expressing the basic distinction which is so essen- tial to the understanding of the capitalist revolution. We may not always be able to avoid using that word, but at least we can try to correct misunderstanding by the employment of other words or phrases for expressing its meaning.
It may be helpful to observe that where Aristotle drew a sharp line between labor and leisure, Adam Smith made the same distinc- tion in human activities by drawing an equally sharp line between what he called “productive labor” and “non-productive labor.” His use of the word “labor” shows that he had socially useful work in mind in both cases, and not idleness or play. By “non-productive labor,” he meant the activities of the clergy, statesmen, philoso- phers, scientists, artists, teachers, physicians and lawyers. He called these activities “labor” because, like the forms of work that are productive of wealth, they are not playful but serious, and serve a socially useful purpose. And he called such labor “non-productive” because, unlike other forms of work, the socially useful purpose they serve is not the production of wealth or the goods of bodily subsistence, but the production of civilization, or the goods of the human spirit.
We think it is better to use the term “work” for both forms of activity. We shall speak of “subsistence work” when we mean the activities that are productive of wealth (i.e., the necessities, com- forts and conveniences of life); and we shall speak of “liberal work” or “leisure work” when we mean the activities that are pro- ductive of the goods of civilization (i.e., the liberal arts and sci- ences, the institutions of the state and of religion).
Whenever we revert to the use of the words “labor” and “lei- sure” without qualification, we hope it will be understood that la- bor is identical with subsistence work and leisure with liberal work. The fact that leisure is equated with one of the two principal forms of human work should help to prevent anyone from con- fusing it with play or idleness. The fact that the goods which it produces are so different from the goods produced by subsistence
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work should also help to preserve the distinction between labor and leisure, which is so necessary for all that follows.
THE FORM AND CHARACTER OF HUMAN WORK
So far we have distinguished two main forms of human work solely by reference to what they produce, or the ends they serve: on the one hand, the goods of the body, the biological goods of subsistence, the necessities, comforts and conveniences of life; on the other hand, the goods of the soul, the goods of civilization or of the human spirit, such things as the arts and sciences, the insti- tutions of the state and of religion.
Work can be differentiated by reference to its human quality as well as by reference to its end or purpose.
Certain forms of work are mechanical in quality. They involve repetitive, routine operations which call for little or no creative in- telligence upon the part of the worker. They also involve bodily exertion, or at least some manual dexterity; but it is the mechanical character of the task to be performed, not the physical character of the performance, which makes such work stultifying.
The materials on which the worker operates, but not his own nature, are improved by his efforts. After he has acquired the minimum skill required for doing it, he learns nothing more. He may increase the store of useful goods in the world, but he does not himself grow in stature as a man.
The Greek word banausia expressed the degrading quality of the mechanical work done by slaves––the dullness of the repeti- tive which is most intense in the kind of toil we call “drudgery.” Because of its repetitiveness, the person who is engaged in it does not grow mentally, morally, or spiritually. On the contrary, drudg- ery stunts growth.
Because it is intrinsically unrewarding, such work must be ex- trinsically compensated. It is done under compulsion––the need for subsistence. Anyone who could secure his subsistence from
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other sources would try to avoid it, or do as little of it as possible. Hence such work is normally done for extrinsic compensation of some sort, whether in the shape of immediately consumable goods, or wages, or the meager subsistence meted out to a slave.
At the opposite extreme from work that is mechanical in qual- ity as well as done to produce and obtain subsistence, there is work that is creative in quality as well as liberal in the end at which it aims. All leisure activities constitute work of this sort. The creative aspect of such work is signified by the Greek word for leisure, which was scholé. Like our English word “school,” it connotes learning––mental, moral, or spiritual growth.
Such work is, therefore, intrinsically rewarding. It is something which every man should, and any virtuous man would, do for its own sake. If he has sufficient property to secure for himself and his family a sufficiency of the means of subsistence, the virtuous man gladly engages in liberal work without extrinsic compensation. Like virtue itself, such work is its own reward.
We have just seen that the forms of human work can be differ- entiated by reference to their human quality, or the effect they have on the worker, as well as differentiated by reference to the goods they produce for society as a whole. We must now observe that these distinctions can be compounded.
At one extreme in the scale of human work, certain socially useful activities combine having the production of wealth as their aim with being mechanical in quality. At the opposite extreme are the highest activities of leisure, which combine being creative in quality with having as their aim the production of the goods of civilization and of the human spirit. In between these extremes, there are the mixed forms of work: on the one hand, subsistence work which, while it aims at the production of wealth, is creative rather than mechanical in quality; on the other hand, work which, while mechanical in quality, nevertheless serves a purpose which is identical with the aim of liberal work.
This fourfold division of the kinds of work is of critical signifi- cance when we come subsequently to consider the variety of tasks
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to be performed in our modern industrial society. For the present, we shall use it in order to call attention to a widely prevalent mis- understanding about the dignity of human work.
In the ancient world––in fact, in all the pre-industrial societies of the past––no one made the mistake of supposing that equal dig- nity attaches to all human activity. Human dignity was thought to reside primarilyinthoseactivitieswhicharespecificallyorcharac- teristically human, i.e., activities which have no counterpart what- soever in the life of brute animals or in the operations of machines.
Brutes as well as men struggle for subsistence. Though the subsistence activities of b rutes are largely instinctive, while those of men usually involve some employment of intelligence or reason, the goal or end of such activities is the same in both cases. Human life has its distinctive worth or dignity only insofar as it rises above biological activities and involves activities which are not performed by brutes, or at least not performed in the same way.
Man’s special dignity lies in goods which no other animal shares with him at all, as other animals share with him the goods of food, shelter, and even those of sleep and play. Hence man has no special dignity as a producer of subsistence or wealth, but only as a user of wealth for the sake of specifically liberal activities produc- tive of the goods of the spirit and of civilization.
It follows, therefore, that the only dignity there is in working to produce subsistence comes from such creative use of intelligence or reason as may be involved in the performance of tasks that are nonmechanical in quality. Even so, they have less dignity than nonmechanical or creative work which is liberal in its aim. Work which is not only mechanical in quality but also has the production of subsistence as its only aim is lowest in the scale. Such dignity as attaches to any work productive of subsistence, whether mechani- cal or creative, derives from the fact that the production of wealth, rightly understood, serves to support the leisure activities that con- stitute the dignity of human life.
It may be thought that St. Paul preaches a Christian message to the contrary when he says of those who do not work, neither shall
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they eat. But it should be remembered, in the first place, that the toil by which man eats in the sweat of his face is a punishment for sin, not an honor or a blessing. And, in the second place, it should be observed that the word St. Paul uses, in making this remark, means any form of socially useful activity, and not labor in the nar- row sense of toil for the sake of subsistence .7 What he is saying, in short, is that all men are under a moral obligation not just to work for a living, but to work in order to deserve a living. In the Chris- tian sense, those who, having the means of subsistence, do not try to live well by doing liberal work enjoy a living they do not deserve.
THE IMAGE OF AN ECONOMICALLY FREE SOCIETY
So far we have seen how the life of a master in a slave society con- tains all the elements of economic freedom, and therewith the op- portunities for leading a good life, which he will use well only if he is a man of virtue.
The possession of sufficient productive capital property en- ables a man to be economically free, but by itself it cannot make him lead a free and liberal life rather than a life devoted to the pro- duction or consumption of subsistence. He may engage in toil or trade even if he does not have to, because he does not have the virtue to rise above it; or, worse than that, he may squander his time and energies in indolence, or in pastimes which, no matter how innocuous, corrupt him precisely because he has elevated them to the level of ends. It should be added that pastimes seldom remain innocuous when they have to fill most of a man’s waking time.
In the pre-industrial aristocracies of the past, only the fortunate few possessed all the elements of economic freedom; and of these, fewer still––those who were virtuous as well as fortunate–– employed that freedom to do the work of leisure to the benefit of themselves and their society. These advantages were bought at the
7 See Jacques Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World, New York, 1936: p. 59.
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terrible price of slavery and misery for the masses who toiled not merely for their own meager subsistence, but to provide the wealth that supported the pursuit of happiness and the development of civilization by those who had economic freedom and used it well.
Freedom built upon slavery, the leisure of a privileged class supported by the unremitting toil of the masses, the opportunity for the few to lead a decent human life as the flower of a civiliza- tion whose roots lay in the submerged and subhuman lives of the toiling masses––this was the accepted order in all the class-divided societies of the pre-industrial past.
We now know what our ancestors did not know: that, under conditions of industrial production, and with the promise of capi- talism fulfilled, it is possible for a whole society to be economically free and for all men to have the opportunity to live like human be- ings.
From the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Jews, and the Greeks down to the middle of the nineteenth century, or even to the end of it, it was generally supposed that slavery, or the equivalent of it in grinding toil and drudgery, was the necessary price that mankind had to pay for the advancement of civilization itself, as contrasted with the static and rudimentary culture of primitive life. If all men had to work for a living, that is, if every one had to spend most of his time in subsistence work in order to support himself and his family, no one would be left free for leisure or nonsubsistence work––the liberal work of civilization itself.
Prior to the industrial revolution, it was almost impossible to conceive a practicable division of labor which, while securing enough wealth to provide the means of liberal work as well as sub- sistence for a whole society, would also permit all members of the society to engage in liberal activities as well as in subsistence work. The only practical solution seemed to be slavery or slave labor in one form or another. The enslavement of the many, in lives occu- pied almost entirely with toil, emancipated the few for the pursuits of civilization. Prior to this century, the achievements of Western civilization––all its fine arts, pure sciences, all its political and reli-
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gious institutions––were the product of the liberal work done by the virtuous members of its leisure class, just as obviously as all its economic crafts and goods were the product of the subsistence work done by its toiling masses.
We said a moment ago that no one prior to our own time could conceive of any practical solution other than one which in- volved slavery, or at least a life for the masses devoted to the me- chanical work of producing subsistence, upon which all men might live and some might, in addition, live well. This amounts to saying that no one could conceive an economically free society, i.e., an eco- nomically classless society in which all men, not just a few, would be economically free and would live like human beings if they were virtuous enough to use their economic freedom well. The state- ment is literally true if by “conceive” we mean thinking out in de- tail a practicable plan for the economic organization of a society that would make all its members economically free.
But one man, more than 2,300 years ago, was able to imagine, even if he could not practically conceive, an economically free so- ciety. His was the kind of fantasy that it takes a genius to dream. Though it was only a dream for him, the image he conjured up is no dream for us. It is the quite practicable ideal of a classless soci- ety of economically free men, with slavery or its equivalents abol- ished, and with the mechanical work of producing subsistence re- duced to a minimum for all.
Though Aristotle did not and could not dream up the capitalist revolution in concrete practical terms, he did, in a single sentence, imagine a possibility that capitalism, and capitalism alone, can real- ize. He said:
If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others . . . if the shuttle could weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief work- men would not want servants, nor masters slaves.8
8 Politics, Book 1, Ch. 4, 1253b34-1254a1. This passage occurs in the context of a statement to the effect that “instruments are of various sorts; some are living,
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Since we are dealing with a dream, let us indulge ourselves in one more moment of dreaming. In that single sentence, Aristotle projected in his imagination a society which has gone beyond the industrial revolution to a state of complete automation: a thorough substitution of automatic machines for slaves, i.e., for human be- ings doing subsistence work of a purely mechanical sort.
It is important to realize that machines can be substituted for men only where men perform tasks that are mechanical in quality; i.e., repetitive tasks performed by rote or rule, and without any in- volvement at all of creative thought. What men do mechanically, machines can do as well, and usually much better. The task (for example, extended calculation) may be mechanical, even though the end for which it is performed is liberal.
With this clearly in mind, we can see that the dream of complete automation envisages all work that is mechanical in quality (whether or not its end is subsistence) being done by automatic machines, including the production of the machines themselves. The invention or improvement of these machines and the man- agement of the productive processes in which they are engaged is work that aims at the production of subsistence, but it is liberal in character. Though its end is subsistence, it is creative; being non- mechanical, it cannot be done by machines. In our dream of com- plete automation, we must, therefore, be careful to exclude the technical work involved in the invention or improvement of ma- chines, and the managerial work involved in the organization and administration of the productive process as a whole.
Even with these two significant exclusions in the sphere of subsistence work, we know that complete automation is impossible, but we also know that within the next hundred years progressively
others lifeless; in the rudder, the pilot of a ship has a lifeless, in the look-out man, a living instrument; for in the arts the servant is a kind of instrument . . . [An economic] possession is an instrument for maintaining life. And so, in the arrangement of the family, a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant is himself an instrument which takes prece- dence over all other instruments” (ibid., 1253b27-33).
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increasing automation will achieve a remarkable approximation of the dream. Hence, by analyzing the dream as if it were real, we can learn something about an ideal that it will be practicable for us to realize approximately.
Let us, then, for one more moment of projection, imagine a society in which machines do all or most of the mechanical work that must be done to provide the wealth necessary both for subsis- tence and for civilization. Let us imagine, further, that in this soci- ety, every man, or every family, has a sufficient share in the private ownership of machines to derive sufficient subsistence from their productivity. In this automated industrial society, each man, as an owner of machines, would be in the same position as an owner of slaves in a slave society. As a capitalist, he would be an economi- cally free man, free from exploitation by other men, free from des- titution or want, free from the drudgery of mechanical work––and so free to live well if he has the virtue to do so.9
Such a society would be a truly classless society, and the very opposite of the class-divided society of the socialist state, in which a despotic bureaucracy constitutes a ruling and owning class as
9 The conception of the machine as an inanimate slave is a familiar thought in our industrial society. But the implications of this idea are seldom, if ever, fol- lowed through to their ultimate conclusion, which is that, like the few who were slave owners in the past, it is now possible for all men to be economically free by acquiring property in the automated machine slaves of the future. On the one hand, Norman Thomas, writing of the future of socialism, says, “Socialism be- lieves that men may be free by making power-driven machinery the slave of mankind” (After the New Deal, What?, New York, 1936: p. 157). But in spite of the fact that the economically free men of the past derived their freedom from owning capital, often including slaves, Thomas as a socialist believes that univer- sal freedom––economic independence and security for all––can be achieved without the private ownership of capital. On the other hand, in a recent speech, Roger Blough, Chairman of the Board of the United States Steel Corporation, cites a reference by the London Economist to machines as “inanimate slaves.” He recommends multiplying them in order to produce more and to distribute more widely the greater wealth produced in the form of a higher standard of living for all; but he does not implement and expand this recommendation by proposing to make all men free by diffusing as widely as possible the individual and private ownership of our inanimate slaves.
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against the mass of the workers who have no economic independ- ence or any effective political power. Even were we to accept at its face value the claim that the dictatorship of the proletariat creates a “classless society,” it would be a classless society of propertyless workers. In contrast, the classless society of capitalism, the image of which we have projected from Aristotle’s extraordinary fantasy, would be a classless society of masters not slaves, of propertied men able to enjoy leisure, not of propertyless men still engaged in toil.
Such a classless society fulfills the ideal of economic democ- racy. All its members would be economically free and equal, even as in a political democracy all men enjoy political freedom and equality. Just as the status of citizenship conferred upon all has achieved political democracy, so the individual and private owner- ship of capital by all households would achieve economic democ- racy.
This ideal can become a practical reality to whatever extent an actual society is able (1) to reduce human toil to the minimum through a proper use of automation; (2) to approximate a universal diffusion of private property in the capital instruments of produc- tion; and (3) to educate its members to devote themselves not only to the wise management and productive use of their productive property, but also to the pursuits of leisure and the production of the goods of civilization.
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