Notes on Communist Manifesto

In the spring of 1847 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels agreed to join the so-called League of the Just, a revolutionary secret society. The league offered to publish a Manifesto drafted y Marx and Engels as its policy document. Later, it was renamed “League of the Communists” and committed to the object of ‘the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the ending of the old society which rests on class contradiction and the establishment of a new society without classes or private property.
Although both Engels and Marx drafted the papers, the final text was certainly written by Marx and was published in Feb, 1848.
Over the next 40 years the Manifesto conquered the world, carried forward by the rise of the new socialist labor parties, and issued in several hundred editions in some 30 languages.
The aim of communism was derived not from analysis of the nature and development of capitalism but fro a philosophical argument about human nature and destiny.
In the 1840s the conclusion that society was on the verge of revolution was implausible. Nor was the prediction that the working class would lead it. Within weeks of the publication of the manifesto a movement of the Paris workers overthrew the French monarchy, and gave the signal for revolution to half of Europe.

Communist Manifesto Aphorisms

-A spectre is haunting Europe- the spectre of communism
-The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
-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… The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to encompass the wealth created by them.
-The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
-The bourgeouise has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
-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 connections everywhere.
-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 civilization.
-It compells all nations, on apin of extinction, to adopt the bourgeous mode of production;it compels them to introduce what it calls civiliation into thier midst,i.e.,to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
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 civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
-It has agglomerated population,centrazlied means of production, and has concentrated property in few hands.
-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.
-The lower strata of the middle class-the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and rentiers,the handicraftsmen and peasanst- 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, partyl because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.
-The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.
-In bourgeoi ssociety capital is independent and has individuality, while the lviving person is dependent and has no individuality.
-The communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.The working men have no country. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation,it is ,so far, itself nation, though not in th ebourgeois sense of the world.
-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.
-The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of rulin class, to win the battle of democracy.
Th proletariar will use its political supremacy to wrestm by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

10 testimonies of Communism

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 rebells.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national banck with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6.Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories andinstruments 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 distirbution 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 etc.