Bourgeois and Proletarians
Bourgeois
& Proletarians is the first of the three major parts of the Communist Manifesto, commissioned by
the Communist League, written in London by Karl Marx, at the age of 29, with
the help of his then 27-year-old friend Frederick Engels, and published in
January, 1848.
Also
included is the final page of the Manifesto, called “Position of the Communists
in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.”
Marx
and Engels were under pressure from the Communist League to get this job done
quickly. The brief was as difficult as it could be: to produce a short,
emphatic, unambiguous, motivational description of historic processes, and to
announce a credible determination to change the world under the leadership of
the most exploited class of people, the working class, also known as the
proletariat.
Marx
and Engels were convinced that the new masters, the capitalists, also known as
burghers, or burgesses, or bourgeoisie, that had grown up in the towns under
feudal rule, were sooner or later going to be overthrown by the proletariat
that the bourgeoisie had brought into existence.
Marx
fell behind the agreed deadline, but came through with a magnificent text just a
few weeks before the February, 1848 events in Paris that brought the
proletariat on to the stage of history to an extent that had not previously
been seen in the world.
The
timing was great, and the text turned out to be classic to the extent that
every line of it is memorable, especially in this first part. It is so rich and
so compressed as to be saturated with meaning, and practically impossible to
summarise. Therefore let us simply quote some of the most extraordinary
sentences, so as to encourage you to read the document, not once but many
times:
The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
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.
The executive of
the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the
whole bourgeoisie.
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 condition of life and his relations with his
kind.
The final words of
the Manifesto are as follows:
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
communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.
Please download and read the text via the
following link:
Further
reading:
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