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A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of Communism.
Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
Bourgeois and Proletarians The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
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.
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.
After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.
Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. 
This much is certain, the ERA OF REVOLUTION has now FAIRLY OPENED IN EUROPE once more. And the general state of affairs is good. 
Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon's dialectics. Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism
There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.
The object of art — like every other product — creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.
The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money.
Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.
Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.
Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.
The devil take this wrong arithmetic. But never mind.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.
The manufacturing system took its place.
Your idea of misery … Submission
But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation.	
Nor is it the irrationality of the form which is taken as characteristic. On the contrary, one overlooks the irrational.
So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.
The entire process seems simple and natural, i.e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism.
Favourite colour … Red
Favourite dish … Fish
Political Economy regards the proletarian … like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work
Your idea of misery … Submission
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising.
Even manufacture no longer sufficed.
It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic
Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production.
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.
Each step in the development of the was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored 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- laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about.
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.
To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feed of industry the national ground on which it stood.
All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.
And as in material, so also in intellectual production.
The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.
In a word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rules of the towns.
It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.
The necessary consequence of this was political centralization.
They had to burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.
And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production.
in proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.
masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers.
As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.
Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class.
All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development.
With the birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie.
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.
But every class struggle is a political struggle.
But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.
Thus the ten-hour bill in England was carried.
Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further the course of development of the proletariat in many ways.
The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle.
These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.
They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative.
Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.
The social conditions of the old society no longer exist for the proletariat.
Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities.
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.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
Society can no longer live under the bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers.
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.
Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
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 mold the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1.
The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit.
property, in it present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor.
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 therefore not personal, it is a social, power.
It is only the social character of the property that is now changed.
It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage-labor.
The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i.e. that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer.
What, therefore, the wage-laborer appropriates by means of his labor, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence.
In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor.
In Communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the pas 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 bourgeoisie, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so.
The abolition of bourgeois individuallity, 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.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property.
In a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property.
Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
That culture, the loss of which he laments is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
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.
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.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole of the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.
The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.
The workingmen have no country.
We cannot take from them what they have not got.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity.
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 let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
These measures will of course be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
Equal obligation of all to work.
Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Free education for all children in public schools.
Abolition of child factory labor in its present form.
Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.
Finally, they labor 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.
Workingmen of all countries, unite!
Germany is no longer a state
This ideal and rational middle term is speech, the tool of reason, the child of intelligent beings
Letter to Niethammer, 13 October 1806
Everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well
reason is purposive activity
Philosophy, if it would be a science, cannot borrow its method from a subordinate science like mathematics
Reason is negative and dialectical, because it resolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing
The forms of thought are, in the first instance, displayed and stored as human language
Here and there in this mesh there are firm knots which give stability and direction to the life and consciousness of spirit
Dialectic is here understood in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative
Just as little is seen in pure light as in pure darkness
There is nothing which is not an intermediate state between being and nothing
We call dialectic the higher movement of reason in which utterly separate terms pass over into each other spontaneously
The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended
To understand how to put questions presupposes a certain education
Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same
Everything is inherently contradictory
It has become a common jest in history to let great effects arise from small causes
Letter to Niethammer, 5 July 1816
At the approach of this kind of syllogism we are at once seized with a feeling of boredom
Freedom is the truth of necessity
It may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all
There are two kinds of laws, laws of nature and laws of right
What is rational is real and what is real is rational
Philosophy cannot teach the state what it should be, but only how it, the ethical universe, is to be known
Impulses must be freed from the form of direct subjection to nature
The propulsion by the universality of thought is the absolute worth of civilisation
The true process is found in the logic, and here in The Philosophy of Right is presupposed
The sequence of the conceptions is at the same time a sequence of realisations
‘Be a person and respect others as persons.’
Personality is that which struggles to lift itself above the restriction of being only subjective and to give itself reality
A person must translate his freedom into an external sphere in order to exist as Idea
I possess my life and my body, like other things, only in so far as my will is in them
From the point of view of others, I am in essence a free entity in my body
What and how much I possess is a matter of indifference so far as rights are concerned
Matter is nothing except the resistance it offers me. ... Yet matter is never without an essential form of its own
Those substantive characteristics which constitute my own private personality are inalienable
I can alienate to someone else and I can give him the use of my abilities only for a restricted period
Existence as determinate being is in essence being for another
Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. 
They come on the scene only in uncivilised conditions
To impose on others is hypocrisy; while to impose on oneself is a stage beyond hypocrisy
The family as a legal entity in relation to others must be represented by the husband as its head
Once the children have come of age, they become recognised as persons
The fact that society has become strong and sure of itself leads to a mitigation of its punishment
No act of revenge is justified
The public authority takes the place of the family where the poor are concerned
Society struggles to make charity less necessary, by discovering the causes of penury and means of its relief
The inner dialectic of civil society drives it to push beyond its own limits and seek markets in other lands
The Corporation comes on to the scene like a second family
The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea
The march of God in the world, that is what the state is
The state is the actuality of concrete freedom
The strength of the state is lies in the unity of its universal end with the particular interest of individual
In particularity and individuality, mind glimmers in them as the power of reason in necessity
Mind is the nature of human beings en masse
Necessity appears to itself in the shape of freedom
The constitution of any given nation depends in general on the character and development of its self-consciousness
The truth of subjectivity is attained only in a subject, and the truth of personality only in a person
The sovereign works on the middle class at the top, and Corporations work on it at the bottom
Public opinion has common sense, but is infected by accidents of opinion, ignorance and perversity
To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational
Free speech is assured by the innocuous character which it acquires as a result of the stability of government
The individual's duty is to maintain the sovereignty of the state, at the risk and sacrifice of property and life
Sacrifice on behalf of the state is the substantial tie between the state and all its members
If the state as such is in jeopardy, all its citizens are in duty bound to answer the summons to its defence
International law springs from the relations between autonomous states
The nation state is Mind in its substantive rationality and immediate actuality — the absolute power on earth
The fundamental proposition of international law is that treaties ought to be kept
It follows that if states disagree, the matter can only be settled by war
War should be not waged against domestic institutions, against the peace of family and private life
Relations between states depend principally upon the customs of nations
The Mind of the world, exercises its right in the ‘history of the world which is the world's court of judgement’
World history is a court of judgement
World history is not the verdict of mere might, but actualisation of the universal mind
The history of Mind is its own act
States, nations, and individuals are all the time the unconscious tools of the world mind at work within them
Each stage of world-history is a necessary moment in the Idea of the World Mind
History is mind clothing itself with the form of events
World-historical actions, culminate with individuals as subjects — living instruments of the World Mind
It is the right of heroes to found states
Civilised nations are justified in regarding as barbarians those who lag behind them in institutions
And so every work of art is a dialogue with everyone who confronts it
The object of philosophy is an actuality of which social regulations and conditions, are only the superficial outside
Experience is the real author of growth and advance of philosophy
Thoughts may be termed Objective Thoughts, thoughts accredited able to express the essential reality of things
To know what free thought means go to Greek philosophy
All the categories of logic may be looked upon as definitions of the Absolute, or metaphysical definitions of God
A man is nothing but the series of his actions
The truth of necessity is, therefore, Freedom
Necessity is blind only so long as it is not understood
A good man is aware that the tenor of his conduct is essentially necessary
The universal ... cost thousands of years to enter the consciousness of men
The theory which regards the Object as Absolute expresses the point of view of superstition and slavish fear
Animal wants and appetites are felt contradiction
Every individual being is some one aspect of the Idea
The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself
The method is not an extraneous form, but the soul and notion of the content
Fire is materialised time
Life is essentially the concept which realises itself only through self-division and reunification
The plant brings forth its light as its own self in the blossom
Only what is living feels a lack
The animal's subjectivity is only the concept in itself but not itself for itself 
The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning
The morality of the individual, then, consists in his fulfilling the duties of his social position
In Nature there happens ‘nothing new under the sun’
The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism has two outstanding characteristics
One is its class nature: it openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat
All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience
Knowledge begins with practice, and theoretical knowledge, which is acquired through practice, must then return to practice
Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth
Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge
This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level
Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective
It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion causes apathy and creates dissension
It is an extremely bad tendency
People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma
They keep both kind of goods in stock and find a use for each
This is how the minds of certain people work
This is one of the tasks on our ideological front
This internal contradiction exists in every single thing, hence its motion and development
If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end
Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved
Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism and others are not
This is the full meaning of the identity of opposites
Qualitatively different contradictions can only be resolved by qualitatively different methods
If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end
Every difference in men's concepts should be regarded as reflecting an objective contradiction
Before it explodes, a bomb is a single entity in which opposites coexist in given conditions
The explosion takes place only when a new condition, ignition, is present
In given conditions having and not having, acquiring and losing, are interconnected; there is identity of the two sides
The fact is that no contradictory aspect can exist in isolation
Without its opposite aspect, each loses the condition for its existence
At first, with regard to certain issues, such contradictions may not manifest themselves as antagonistic
But with the development of the class struggle, they may grow and become antagonistic
Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things that are decisive
The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale
People necessarily wield military and economic power
All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust
We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive, just wars
Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars; we actively participate in them
In seeking victory, those who direct a war cannot overstep the limitations imposed by the objective conditions
Within these limitations, however, they can and must play a dynamic role in striving for victory
Without preparedness, superiority is not real superiority and there can be no initiative either
Having grasped this point, a force that is inferior but prepared can often defeat a superior enemy by surprise attack
The army must become one with the people so that they see it as their own army Such an army will be invincible
Without preparedness superiority is not real superiority and there can be no initiative either
Having grasped this point, a force which is inferior but prepared, can often defeat a superior enemy by surprise attack
When the obstacle is removed and our political aim attained the war will stop
Revolutionary war is an anti-toxin which not only eliminates the enemy's poison but also purges us of our own filth
The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people
It is mainly because of the unorganized state of the Chinese masses that Japan dares to bully us
The same now with the philosophy of Hegel.
Real talers have the same existence that the imagined gods have.
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
What is genuine is proved in the fire, what is false we shall not miss in our ranks.
The opponents must grant us that youth has never before flocked to our colours in such numbers, 
in the end, one will be found among us who will prove that the sword of enthusiasm is just as good as the sword of genius.
The representation of private interests 
the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions.
The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape.
Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.
The bureaucrat has the world as a mere object of his action.
This is a kind of mutual reconciliation society
Actual extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are actual extremes.
But neither are they in need of mediation, because they are opposed in essence.
All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.
We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles.
We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle.
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.
To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.
But, for man, the root is man himself.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people.
The state is based on this contradiction.
It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests.
For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities
When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end.
Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale,
The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other.
We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect.
By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty, and therefore a humiliation
Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual objects.
Hence for us man himself is mutually of no value.
Political Economy regards the proletarian 
like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work.
It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being.
It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.
But also when I am active scientifically, etc.
Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, .
Man is directly a natural being.
These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities — as instincts.
A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature.
A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being.
A few days in my old man’s factory have sufficed to bring me face to face with this beastliness, which I had rather overlooked.
it is impossible to carry on communist propaganda on a large scale and at the same time engage in huckstering and industry.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.
We know only a single science, the science of history.
One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men.
Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas
As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist.
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and 
the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, 
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals.
By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.
This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.
Language is the immediate actuality of thought.
Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm.
History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’.
The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.
Proudhon, taking these relations for principles, categories, has merely to put into order these thoughts.
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.
A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations.
The liberation of Germany cannot therefore take place without the liberation of Poland from German oppression.
Under the freedom of trade the whole severity of the laws of political economy will be applied to the working classes.
And this life activity [the worker] sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life.
He works that he may keep alive.
He does not count the labor itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life.
It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another.
Only under certain conditions does he become a slave.
A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton.
Only under certain conditions does it become capital.
Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar
But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut.
The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain.
What is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital.
But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive.
It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point.
In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution.
It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned 
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.
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.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you.
When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
It will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.
He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.
But the revolution is thoroughgoing.
It is still traveling through purgatory.
It does its work methodically.
What I did that was new was to prove:
that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production,
that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat,
that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
History is the judge — its executioner, the proletarian.
The Afghans are a brave, hardy, and independent race; they follow pastoral or agricultural occupations only 
With them, war is an excitement and relief from the monotonous occupation of industrial pursuits.
Production by an isolated individual outside society 
is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.
the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production.
However, on closer examination this proves false.
The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed.
Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.
In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, 
a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity.
an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces.
The pay of the common soldier is also reduced to a minimum — determined purely by the production costs necessary to procure him.
But he exchanges the performance of his services not for capital, but for the revenue of the state.
through private consumption, the capitalist posits himself as capitalist.
Rather, he thereby spends the fruits of his capital.
The man who takes the cloth I supplied to him and makes me an article of clothing out of it gives me a use value.
But instead of giving it directly in objective form, he gives it in the form of activity.
I give him a completed use value; he completes another for me.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an era of social revolution.
The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense.
A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on.
A criminal produces crimes.
I do not think I shall be able to deliver the manuscript of the first volume to Hamburg before October.
I cannot go to Geneva.
Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, ie of the use-values it produces.
As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.
A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood.
Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.
This I call the Fetishism ... of commodities.
He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him.
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms.
It is with man as with commodities.
Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind.
And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
Capital is money: Capital is commodities.
Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself.
It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, 
As capitalist, he is only capital personified.
His soul is the soul of capital.
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.
machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.
That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.
That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer.
What the latter sells is his labour-power.
As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him.
Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value.
Thus integument is burst asunder.
The knell of capitalist private property sounds.
The expropriators are expropriated.
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment.
Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).
The English have at their disposal all necessary material preconditions for a social revolution.
What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary passion.
But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.
Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry.
Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described.
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite.
With him it is standing on its head.
It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power.
Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms.
It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy.
Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry.
Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described.
The bourgeoisie is just as necessary a precondition for the socialist revolution as is the proletariat itself.
Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, 
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.
Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature.
For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us.
Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert.
And it really is the source — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth.
But it is even infinitely more than this.
That is the only materialist conception of the matter.
Neither of us cares a straw for popularity.
It is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another.
But theoretical thinking is an innate quality only as regards natural capacity.
The Greeks were not yet advanced enough to dissect, analyse nature — nature is still viewed as a whole, in general.
Herein lies the inadequacy of Greek philosophy, 
But herein also lies its superiority over all its subsequent metaphysical opponents.
If in regard to the Greeks metaphysics was right in particulars, in regard to metaphysics the Greeks were right in general.
To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed.
All we have seen so far are some rather meagre outlines.
I do not proceed from “concepts,” hence neither from the “concept of value,” and am therefore in no way concerned to “divide” it.
It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted.
For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself.
And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three:
The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
The law of the negation of the negation.
This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science.
The doctrine of Hegel, taken as a whole, left plenty of room for giving shelter to the most diverse practical party views.
And in the theoretical Germany of that time, two things above all were practical: religion and politics.
The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps.
The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.
Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted.
To my mind, the so-called ‘socialist society’ is not anything immutable.
Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change.
To begin this reorganization tomorrow, but performing it gradually, seems to me quite feasible.
as among the workers.
If we had to start wielding power tomorrow, we should need engineers, chemists, agronomists.
Well, it is my conviction that we would have a good many of them behind us already.
In five or ten years we shall have more of them than we need.
All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.
But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity.
The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.
Thus the entire technique of production and transport is here included.
According to our conception, this technique also determines the method of exchange and, further, the division of products
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation.
The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself.
The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification.
As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness.
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated.
It is a world vision which has become objectified.
The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production.
It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration.
It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society.
It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption.
The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals.
Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split up into reality and image.
The social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is also the real totality which contains the spectacle.
But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal.
One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided.
The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced.
Objective reality is present on both sides.
This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.
In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.
The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena.
But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time.
It is the historical movement in which we are caught.
The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible.
It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.
The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends.
It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity.
It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.
The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist.
In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything.
The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.
The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them.
It is no more than the economy developing for itself.
It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.
At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it.
It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.
But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with hearing.
It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work.
It is the opposite of dialogue.
Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.
The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality.
The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.
Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology.
The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.
The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable.
It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise.
To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary.
The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.
The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.
The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle.
The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others.
It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned.
Here the most modern is also the most archaic.
The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue.
It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.
But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development.
The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content.
Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle.
The spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence.
It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity.
The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world.
by non-work, by inactivity.
There can be no freedom outside of activity, and in the context of the spectacle all activity is negated.
just as real activity has been captured in its entirety for the global construction of this result.
None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result.
The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation.
The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn.
In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it.
The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation.
What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation.
The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.
This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.
The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power.
The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession.
All the time and space of his world become foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated products.
The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory.
The very powers which escaped us show themselves to us in all their force.
The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation.
Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production.
What grows with the economy in motion for itself can only be the very alienation which was at its origin.
The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life.
The quantitative is what the commodity-form develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.
In a primitive economy, the commodity sector represented a surplus of survival.
The independence of the commodity is extended to the entire economy over which it rules.
The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy.
The abundance of commodities, namely, of commodity relations, can be nothing more than increased survival.
It is then that political economy takes shape, as the dominant science and the science of domination.
The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life.
Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world.
Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively.
In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities.
It is all the sold labor of a society which globally becomes the total commodity for which the cycle must be continued.
Thus the “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of human existence.
But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation.
Mobilizing all human use and establishing a monopoly over its satisfaction, exchange value has ended up by directing use.
The process of exchange became identified with all possible use and reduced use to the mercy of exchange.
Exchange value is the condottiere of use value who ends up waging the war for himself.
The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions.
The commodity is this factually real illusion, and the spectacle is its general manifestation.
The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities.
The spectacle is not only the servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself the pseudo-use of life.
The entire expanse of society is its portrait.
The victory of the autonomous economy must at the same time be its defeat.
The forces which it has unleashed eliminate the economic necessity which was the immutable basis of earlier societies.
“All that is conscious wears out.
What is unconscious remains unalterable.
But once freed, does it not fall to ruins in turn?” (Freud).
As soon as society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy, in fact, depends on society.
This subterranean force, which grew until it appeared sovereign, has lost its power.
That which was the economic it must become the I.
The subject can emerge only from society, namely from the struggle within society.
Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction.
The society which carries the spectacle does not dominate the underdeveloped regions by its economic hegemony alone.
It dominates them as the society of the spectacle.
Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally.
But just as the activities of the star are not really global, they are not really varied.
The decision celebrity must possess a complete stock of accepted human qualities.
In this way, the endless series of trivial confrontations is set up again.
from competitive sports to elections, mobilizing a sub-ludic interest.
Things rule and are young; things confront and replace one another.
What hides under the spectacular oppositions is a unity of misery.
This dictatorship must be accompanied by permanent violence.
Everyone must magically identify with this absolute celebrity or disappear.
If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else.
Wherever the concentrated spectacle rules, so does the police.
The diffuse spectacle accompanies the abundance of commodities, the undisturbed development of modern capitalism.
The spectacle, then, is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy.
The spectacle does not sing the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions.
A style of dress emerges from a film; a magazine promotes night spots which launch various clothing fads.
Reified man advertises the proof of his intimacy with the commodity.
The only use which remains here is the fundamental use of submission.
The abundant commodity stands for the total breach in the organic development of social needs.
Its mechanical accumulation liberates unlimited artificiality, in the face of which living desire is helpless.
The cumulative power of independent artificiality sows everywhere the falsification of social life.
It reveals its essential poverty (which naturally comes to it from the misery of its production) too late.
But by then another object already carries the justification of the system and demands to be acknowledged.
Every new lie of advertising is also an avowal of the previous lie.
What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change and must change with its base.
The spectacle is absolutely dogmatic and at the same time cannot really achieve any solid dogma.
Nothing stops for the spectacle; this condition is natural to it, yet completely opposed to its inclination.
What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what separates them from it.
What brings together men liberated from their local and national boundaries is also what pulls them apart.
What requires a mare profound rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchic exploitation and repression.
What creates the abstract power of society creates its concrete unfreedom.
The development of productive forces shatters the old relations of production and all static order turns to dust.
Whatever was absolute becomes historical.
Hegel no longer had to interpret the world, but the transformation of the world.
By only interpreting the transformation, Hegel is only the philosophical completion of philosophy.
He wants to understand a world which makes itself.
Thus it has gone beyond separation only in thought.
In this sense, it is “not a philosophy of the revolution, but of the restoration” (Karl Korsch, Theses on Hegel and Revolution).
In those times of general effervescence, this was all the more fatal to him.”
History become real no longer has an end.
Marx ruined Hegel’s position as separate from what happens, as well as contemplation by any supreme external agent whatever.
From now on, theory has to know only what it does.
Marx’s project is the project of a conscious history.
“We know only one science: the science of history” (The German Ideology).
Inversely, history directly depends on economic knowledge only to the extent that it remains economic history.
On the contrary.
the utopian thinkers are completely dominated by the scientific thought of earlier centuries.
“How did they want to seize through struggle what must be proved?” asked Sombart.
“History has shown that we, and all who thought as we did, were wrong.
It is this mutilation, later accepted as definitive, which has constituted “marxism.”
The weakness of Marx’s theory is naturally the weakness of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time.
The working class did not set off the permanent revolution in the Germany of 1848; the Commune was defeated in isolation.
Revolutionary theory thus could not yet achieve its own total existence.
The same simplification led Marx to neglect the economic role of the State in the management of a class society.
The proletariat cannot itself come to power except by becoming the class of consciousness.
The growth of productive forces cannot guarantee such power, even by way of the increasing dispossession which it brings about.
A Jacobin seizure of power cannot be its instrument.
They are requirements of the theory which have not been formulated theoretically.
The anarchists have an ideal to realize.
It is the ideology of pure liberty which equalizes everything and dismisses the very idea of historical evil.
In 1936, anarchism in fact led a social revolution, the most advanced model of proletarian power in all time.
In this context it should be noted that the signal for a general insurrection had been imposed by a pronunciamiento of the army.
Its known leaders became ministers and hostages of the bourgeois State which destroyed the revolution only to lose the civil war.
It was conducted in the name of revolutionary illusion by means of an obviously reformist practice.
The revolutionary ideology was to be shattered by the very success of those who held it.
But such an antagonism, guaranteed by their science, was constantly belied by history.
But the contradiction was definitively demonstrated only by historical development itself.
It therefore became the profession of the absolute management of society.
Lenin did not reproach the Marxism of the Second International for being a revolutionary ideology, but for ceasing to be one.
We’ve had enough opposition.”
At that paint ideology is no longer a weapon, but a goal.
The lie which is no longer challenged becomes lunacy.
Reality as well as the goal dissolve in the totalitarian ideological proclamation: all it says is all there is.
This is a local primitivism of the spectacle, whose role is nevertheless essential in the development of the world spectacle.
Extended everywhere, the bureaucracy must be the class invisible to consciousness; as a result all social life becomes insane.
The social organization of the absolute lie flows from this fundamental contradiction.
Stalinism was the reign of terror within the bureaucratic class itself.
Its real property being hidden, the bureaucracy became proprietor by way of false consciousness.
False consciousness can maintain its absolute power only by means of absolute terror, where all real motives are ultimately lost.
But effective participation in this falsehood requires that it be recognized as actual participation.
Fascism was an extremist defense of the bourgeois economy threatened by crisis and by proletarian subversion.
But this rationalization is itself burdened by the immense irrationality of its means.
Fascism is technically-equipped archaism.
Its decomposed ersatz of myth is revived in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion.
Thus the bureaucracy is bound to an ideology which is no longer believed by anyone.
At the present moment of its development, the bureaucracy’s title to ideological property is already collapsing internationally.
This division of labor within the spectacle comes to an end when the pseudo-revolutionary role in turn divides.
The spectacular element of the collapse of the workers’ movement will itself collapse.
The Leninist illusion has no contemporary base outside of the various Trotskyist tendencies.
Trotsky’s subsequent struggle for the Fourth International contains the same inconsistency.
It has not been suppressed.
It is this that must find its suitable form in action.
These are the portents of a second proletarian assault against class society.
Pannekoek rightly insisted that choosing the power of workers’ Councils “poses problems” rather than providing a solution.
Yet it is precisely in this power where the problems of the proletarian revolution can find their real solution.
This is where the objective conditions of historical consciousness are reunited.
He is to himself his own goal.
Only there is the spectacular negation of life negated in its turn.
At the new moment of proletarian critique, this result returns as the only undefeated point of the defeated movement.
It must recognize itself as no more than a radical separation from the world of separation.
Its own practice is the generalization of communication and of coherence in these struggles.
It must struggle constantly against its deformation in the ruling spectacle.
It requires workers to become dialecticians and to inscribe their thought into practice.
Man’s appropriation of his own nature is at the same time his grasp of the unfolding of the universe.
“History is itself a real part of natural history, of the transformation of nature into man” (Marx).
History has always existed, but not always in a historical form.
The temporalization of man as effected through the mediation of a society is equivalent to a humanization of time.
The unconscious movement of time manifests itself and becomes true within historical consciousness.
There, all knowledge, confined within the memory of the oldest, is always carried by the living.
Neither death nor procreation is grasped as a law of time.
Time remains immobile, like an enclosed space.
A static society organizes time in terms of its immediate experience of nature, on the model of cyclical time.
Eternity is internal to it; it is the return of the same here on earth.
The social appropriation of time, the production of man by human labor, develops within a society divided into classes.
The owners of historical surplus value possess the knowledge and the enjoyment of lived events.
Cyclical time in itself is time without conflict.
In each of these societies a definitive structuring excluded change.
Absolute conformism in existing social practices.
Here, in order to remain human, men must remain the same.
Irreversible time is now the time of those who rule, and dynasties are its first measure.
Writing is its weapon.
In writing, language attains its complete independent reality as mediation between consciousnesses.
But this independence is identical to the general independence of separate power as the mediation which constitutes society.
“Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory” (Novalis).
The owners of history have given time a meaning: a direction which is also a significance.
The growth of their real historical power goes together with a popularization of the possession of myth and illusion.
Reasoning about history is inseparably reasoning about power.
Greece was the moment when power and its change were discussed and understood, the democracy of the masters of society.
Only those who do not work live.
In Greece historical time became conscious, but not yet conscious of itself.
But there they still preserve themselves in radical opposition to history.
Eternity came out of cyclical time and is beyond it.
Bossuet will still say: “And by means of the time that passes we enter into the eternity which does not pass.”
The social revolt of the millenarian peasantry defines itself naturally first of all as a will to destroy the Church.
But millenarianism spreads in the historical world, and not on the terrain of myth.
The millenarians had to lose because they could not recognize the revolution as their own operation.
In the exuberant life of the Italian cities, in the art of the festival, life is experienced as enjoyment of the passage of time.
But this enjoyment of passage is itself a passing enjoyment.
The bourgeoisie is attached to labor time, which is liberated for the first time from the cyclical.
With the bourgeoisie, work becomes labor which transforms historical conditions.
The bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which labor is a value.
The world’s foundation has changed.
But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates these vestiges on every corner of the globe.
This blind prehistory, a new fatality dominated by no one, is all that the commodity economy democratized.
The history which is present in all the depths of society tends to be lost at the surface.
Thus the bourgeoisie made known to society and imposed on it an irreversible historical time, but kept its use from society.
With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a world scale.
Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is gathered under the development of this time.
But this history, which is everywhere simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within history of history itself.
What appears the world over as the same day is the time of economic production cut up into equal abstract fragments.
Unified irreversible time is the time of the world market and, as a corollary, of the world spectacle.
The irreversible time of production is first of all the measure of commodities.
The time of production, commodity-time, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals.
This time is in reality exactly what it is in its exchangeable character.
This is time devalued, the complete inversion of time as “the field of human development.”
Pseudo-cyclical time is actually no more than the consumable disguise of the commodity-time of production.
Pseudo-cyclical time is a time transformed by industry.
Here this commodity is explicitly presented as the moment of real life, and the point is to wait for its cyclical return.
What was represented as genuine life reveals itself simply as more genuinely spectacular life.
In the spectacle, the lower the use value of modern survival-time, the more highly it is exalted.
The reality of time has been replaced by the advertisement of time.
In spectacular time, since dead labor continues to dominate living labor, the past dominates the present.
Another side of the deficiency of general historical life is that individual life as yet has no history.
It is not communicated.
It is not understood and is forgotten to the profit of the false spectacular memory of the unmemorable.
The spectacular return of time became possible only after this first dispossession of the producer.
One who has renounced using his life can no longer admit his death.
On all other fronts of the advertising onslaught, it is strictly forbidden to grow old.
This social absence of death is identical to the social absence of life.
Precisely the opposite is true in the dominant alienation, which is undergone by the producer of an alien present.
The natural basis of time, the actual experience of the flow of time, becomes human and social by existing for man.
The world already possesses the dream of a time whose consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live it.
Capitalist production has unified space, which is no longer bounded by external societies.
This unification is at the same time an extensive and intensive process of banalization.
This power of homogenization is the heavy artillery which brought down all Chinese walls.
This society which eliminates geographical distance reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation.
The economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence.
The same modernization that removed time from the voyage also removed from it the reality of space.
The present is already the time of the self-destruction of the urban milieu.
Universal history was born in cities and reached maturity at the moment of the decisive victory of city over country.
The city could as yet only struggle for historical freedom, but not possess it.
“The countryside shows the exact opposite: isolation and separation” (German Ideology).
History, which threatens this twilight world, is also the force which could subject space to lived time.
The greatest revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itself urbanistic, technological or esthetic.
Culture is the locus of the search for lost unity.
In this search for unity, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself.
But this “first condition of any critique” is also the first obligation of a critique without end.
It is the sense of a world which hardly makes sense.
One of these movements has linked its fate to social critique, the other to the defense of class power.
The affirmation of its independence is the beginning of its disintegration.
It can only be evoked as a memory.
The greatness of art begins to appear only at the dusk of life.
The historical time which invades art expressed itself first of all in the sphere of art itself, starting with the baroque.
The art of the change must carry within itself the ephemeral principle it discovers in the world.
The arts of all civilizations and all epochs can be known and accepted together for the first time.
Once this “collection of souvenirs” of art history becomes possible, it is also the end of the world of art.
The more grandiose its reach, the more its true realization is beyond it.
This art is perforce avant-garde, and it is not.
Its avant-garde is its disappearance.
Dadaism and surrealism are the two currents which mark the end of modern art.
Dadaism and surrealism are at once historically related and opposed to each other.
Dadaism wanted to suppress art without realizing it; surrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it.
It is the same project everywhere: a restructuring without community.
When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society.
It does not know that conflict is at the origin of all things in its world.
Boorstin describes the excesses of a world which has become foreign to us as if they were excesses foreign to our world.
The truth of this society is nothing other than the negation of this society.
Thus the spectacle would be caused by the fact that modern man is too much of a spectator.
It is obvious that no idea can lead beyond the existing spectacle, but only beyond the existing ideas about the spectacle.
To effectively destroy the society of the spectacle, what is needed is men putting a practical force into action.
This theory does not expect miracles from the working class.
It envisages the new formulation and the realization of proletarian imperatives as a long-range task.
Critical theory must be communicated in its own language.
It is the language of contradiction, which must be dialectical in form as it is in content.
It is critique of the totality and historical critique.
It is not “the nadir of writing” but its inversion.
It is not a negation of style, but the style of negation.
In its very style.
This style which contains its own critique must express the domination of the present critique over its entire past.
The very mode of exposition of dialectical theory displays the negative spirit within it.
“Truth is not like a product in which one can no longer find any trace of the tool that made it” (Hegel).
Ideas improve.
The meaning of words participates in the improvement.
Plagiarism is necessary.
Progress implies it.
It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.
Diversion is the fluid language of anti-ideology.
It appears in communication which knows it cannot pretend to guarantee anything definitively and in itself.
At its peak, it is language which cannot be confirmed by any former or supra-critical reference.
Diversion has grounded its cause on nothing external to its own truth as present critique.
Only the real negation of culture can preserve its meaning.
It can no longer be cultural.
Thus it is what in some way remains at the level of culture, but with a completely different meaning.
This unified theoretical critique goes alone to meet unified social practice.
Ideology is the basis of the thought of a class society in the conflict-laden course of history.
In this type of assertion, the particular names of ideologies have disappeared.
Materialized ideology itself has no name, just as it has no expressible historical program.
This is another way of saying that the history of ideologies is over.
Its completion is also its disintegration throughout society.
grows coextensively with the mass of objects.” It is the highest stage of an expansion which has turned need against life.
Society has become what ideology already was.
Ideology is at home; separation has built its world.
The spectacle, in its entirety, is his “mirror image.” Here the stage is set with the false exit of generalized autism.
The acceptance and consumption of commodities are at the heart of this pseudo-response to a communication without response.
It must struggle in practice among the irreconcilable enemies of the spectacle and admit that it is absent where they are absent.
Thus madness reappears in the very posture which pretends to fight it.
Conversely, the critique which goes beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.
Emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth this is what the self-emancipation of our epoch consists of.
Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism.
They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul.
They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie.
All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don't laugh!).
This will necessitate a number of long quotations from the works of Marx and Engels themselves.
This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state.
The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.
The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled.
And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.
It is on this most important and fundamental point that the distortion of Marxism, proceeding along two main lines, begins.
According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen nor maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes.
On the other hand, the “Kautskyite” distortion of Marxism is far more subtle.
“Theoretically”, it is not denied that the state is an organ of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable.
And — as we shall show in detail further on — it is this conclusion which Kautsky has “forgotten” and distorted.
“As distinct from the old gentile [tribal or clan] order,[2] the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory...."
What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.
A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power.
But how can it be otherwise?
They could not understand at all what a “self-acting armed organization of the population” was.
But such an organization would still be possible.
We shall see how this question is specifically illustrated by the experience of the European and Russian revolutions.
But to return to Engel's exposition.
This was written not later than the early nineties of the last century, Engel's last preface being dated June 16, 1891.
The maintenance of the special public power standing above society requires taxes and state loans.
“Having pubic power and the right to levy taxes,” Engels writes, “the officials now stand, as organs of society, above society.
The question of the privileged position of the officials as organs of state power is raised here.
We must also note that Engels is most explicit in calling universal suffrage as well an instrument of bourgeois rule.
Universal suffrage, he says, obviously taking account of the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is
“the gauge of the maturity of the working class.
It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state."
Engels gives a general summary of his views in the most popular of his works in the following words:
“The state, then, has not existed from all eternity.
There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power.
They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage.
Along with them the state will inevitably fall.
We do not often come across this passage in the propaganda and agitation literature of the present-day Social-Democrats.
In most cases we do not even find an understanding of what Engels calls the state machine.
We shall quote the whole argument from which they are taken.
“The proletariat seizes from state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with.
The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation.
When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary.
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself.
The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.
The state is not 'abolished'.
It withers away.
Such an “interpretation”, however, is the crudest distortion of Marxism, advantageous only to the bourgeoisie.
It is not done to ponder over over the meaning of this.
What withers away after this revolution is the proletarian state or semi-state.
Secondly, the state is a “special coercive force"
Engels gives this splendid and extremely profound definition here with the utmost lucidity.
This is precisely what is meant by “abolition of the state as state"
This is precisely the “act” of taking possession of the means of production in the name of society.
We all know that the political form of the “state” at that time is the most complete democracy.
This seems very strange at first sight.
Revolution alone can “abolish” the bourgeois state.
The state in general, i.e., the most complete democracy, can only “wither away"
The “free people's state” was a programme demand and a catchword current among the German Social-Democrats in the seventies.
We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism.
But we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic.
Furthermore, every state is a “special force” for the suppression of the oppressed class.
Consequently, every state is not “free” and not a “people's state".
Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies.
Engels' historical analysis of its role becomes a veritable panegyric on violent revolution.
And yet it is inseparably bound up with the 'withering away" of the state into one harmonious whole.
This sort of substitution is, of course, nothing new; it was observed even in the history of classical Greek philosophy.
The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.
We shall now pass to this, undoubtedly the most important, part of their theory.
The state is a special organization of force: it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class.
What class must the proletariat suppress? Naturally, only the exploiting class, i.e., the bourgeoisie.
He developed his theory of the class struggle consistently, down to the theory of political power, of the state.
The culmination of this rule is the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat.
"But the revolution is throughgoing.
It is still journeying through purgatory.
It does its work methodically.
By December 2, 1851 [the day of Louis Bonaparte's coup d'etat], it had completed one half of its preparatory work.
It is now completing the other half.
First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it.
Napoleon completed this state machinery".
The legitimate monarchy and the July monarchy "added nothing but a greater division of labor"
All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.
In this remarkable argument, Marxism takes a tremendous step forward compared with the Communist Manifesto.
This conclusion is the chief and fundamental point in the Marxist theory of the state.
This is the question Marx raises and answers in 1852.
The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism.
Two institutions most characteristic of this state machine are the bureaucracy and the standing army.
Every worker's experience illustrates this connection in an extremely graphic and impressive manner.
From its own bitter experience, the working class learns to recognize this connection.
Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following February 27, 1917.
Nobody has really thought of introducing any serious reforms.
Experience had not yet provided material for dealing with this question, which history placed on the agenda later on, in 1871.
In his introduction to the third edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Engels wrote:
Let us, however, cast a general glance over the history of the advanced countries at the turn of the century.
What the proletariat will put in its place is suggested by the highly instructive material furnished by the Paris Commune.
This letter, among other things, contains the following remarkable observation:
It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's theory is the class struggle.
But this is wrong.
Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois.
This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested.
Marx, however, was not only enthusiastic about the heroism of the Communards, who, as he expressed it, "stormed heaven".
Marx endeavored to analyze this experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it and re-examine his theory in the light of it.
The last preface to the new German edition of the Communist Manifesto, signed by both its authors, is dated June 24, 1872.
The authors took the words that are in single quotation marks in this passage from Marx's book, The Civil War in France.
We shall deal with this distortion more fully farther on, in a chapter devoted specially to distortions.
As a matter of fact, the exact opposite is the case.
As for Marx's reference to The Eighteenth Brumaire, we have quoted the relevant passage in full above.
It is interesting to note, in particular, two points in the above-quoted argument of Marx.
First, he restricts his conclusion to the Continent.
Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperialist war, this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid.
In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of the people in any country on the Continent.
These two classes then constituted the “people”.
These two classes are united by the fact that the "bureaucratic-military state machine" oppresses, crushes, exploits them.
By what exactly?
Marx subjected the experience of the Commune, meagre as it was, to the most careful analysis in The Civil War in France.
Let us quote the most important passages of this work.
[All the following quotes in this Chapter, with one exception, are so citied – Ed.]
The Second Empire consolidated this.
What was this “specific” form of the proletarian, socialist republic? What was the state it began to create?
This demand now figures in the programme of every party calling itself socialist.
The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class.
So were the officials of all other branches of the administration.
From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen's wages.
The judicial functionaries lost that sham independence
they were thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and revocable15."
It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance.
The reduction of the remuneration of high state officials seem “simply” a demand of naive, primitive democracy.
"The Commune," Marx wrote, "was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time
"The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time."
parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the "common people".
In the Soviets, the “socialist” Ministers are fooling the credulous rustics with phrase-mongering and resolutions.
meanwhile the chancelleries and army staffs “do” the business of “state”.
There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he made up or invented a “new” society.
Abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, is out of the question.
It is a utopia.
We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination.
The subordination, however, must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and working people, i.e., to the proletariat.
This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution.
This is very true.
At the present the postal service is a business organized on the lines of state-capitalist monopoly.
But the mechanism of social management is here already to hand.
This is what will bring about the abolition of parliamentarism and the preservation of representative institutions.
This is what will rid the laboring classes of the bourgeoisie's prostitution of these institutions.
It is ridiculous.
But the remarkable thing is that nobody argued with Bernstein on this point.
There is not a trace of federalism in Marx's above-quoted observation on the experience of the Commune.
Marx agreed with Proudhon on the very point that the opportunist Bernstein did not see.
Marx disagreed with Proudhon on the very point on which Bernstein found a similarity between them.
Marx agreed with Proudhon in that they both stood for the “smashing” of the modern state machine.
Marx was a centralist.
There is no departure whatever from centralism in his observations just quoted.
to be organized", so as to oppose conscious, democratic, proletarian centralism to bourgeois, military, bureaucratic centralism.
But there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.
We have already quoted Marx's words on the subject, and we must now supplement them.
as a federation of small states (as Montesquieu and the Girondins16 visualized it)
as an exaggerated form of the old struggle against overcentralization
By this one act it would have initiated the regeneration of France
"Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion"
Marx, however, did not set out to discover the political forms of this future stage.
Marx gave the fundamentals concerning the significance of the experience of the Commune.
The change in the form of state power is not examined here, but only the content of its activity.
Expropriations and billetings take place by order even of the present state.
From the formal point of view, the proletarian state will also “order” the occupation of dwellings and expropriation of houses.
Engels expresses himself most cautiously.
Marxism has always taught that with the abolition of classes the state will also be abolished.
This controversy took place in 1873.
The proletariat needs the state only temporarily.
We do not after all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim.
Engels expounds the same ideas in much greater detail and still more popularly.
But they are blind to all facts that make authority necessary and they passionately fight the word.
They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority.
And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.
Or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the cause of the proletariat.
Against, the most remarkable thing in this argument of Engels' is the way he states his case against the anarchists.
What Engels says is different.
He stresses that all socialists recognize that the state will disappear as a result of the socialist revolution.
Letter to Bebel
Engels wrote to Bebel criticizing the same draft of the Gotha Programme which Marx criticized in his famous letter to Bracke.
"The free people's state has been transferred into the free state.
Let them howl.
This will earn them the praises of the bourgeoisie.
And we shall go on with our work.
Certainly no one opposed to the advice of Engels and Marx will be found among the Bolsheviks.
The only difficulty that may perhaps arise will be in regard to the term.
In Russian there is no such word, and we may have to choose the French word “commune”, although this also has its drawbacks.
After what has been said above, this statement is perfectly clear.
It had smashed the bourgeois state machine.
In place of a special coercive force the population itself came on the scene.
All this was a departure from the state in the proper sense of the word.
In saying this, Engels above all has in mind Bakunin and his attacks on the German Social-Democrats.
Unfortunately, Engels' letter was pigeon-holed for 36 years.
But if we take Bebel's pamphlet, Our Aims, we find there views on the state that are absolutely wrong.
The trusts, of course, never provided, do not now provide, and cannot provide complete planning.
But to return to the question of the state.
In regard to the republic, Engels made this the focal point of this criticism of the draft of the Erfurt Programme.
"The political demands of the draft," engels wrote, "have one great fault.
It lacks [Engels' italics] precisely what should have been said."
But he refused to merely accept this obvious consideration which satisfied “everybody”.
He continued: "Nevertheless, somehow or other, the thing has to be attacked.
Engels was careful not to tie his hands.
In the long run such a policy can only lead one's own party astray.
This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown"
On the subject of a federal republic, in connection with the national composition of the population, Engels wrote:
For Germany, federalization on the Swiss model would be an enormous step backward.
And among these special conditions, he puts the national question to the fore.
Carrying forward the programme views of Marxism on the state, Engels wrote:
The abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state."
Naturally, people who have bound themselves by a “coalition” to the imperialist bourgeoisie have remained deaf to this criticism.
This is wrong.
It is disproved by the facts cited by Engels regarding the centralized French Republic of 792-98 and the federal Swiss Republic.
The really democratic centralized republic gave more freedom that the federal republic.
The 1891 Preface to Marx's "The Civil War in France"
Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers."
This summary of the experience of bourgeois revolutions is as concise as it is expressive.
Tsereteli, deserted to the bourgeoisie against the revolutionary proletariat.
Another incidental remark of Engels', also connected with the question of the state, deals with religion.
But let us see how, 20 years after the Commune, Engels summed up its lessons for the fighting proletariat.
Here are the lessons to which Engels attached prime importance:
And, in the second place, it paid all officials, high or low, only the wages received by other workers.
The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs.
This is a sophism like the old joke about a man becoming bald by losing one more hair.
Taken separately, no kind of democracy will bring socialism.
This is the dialectics of living history.
Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy
Engels came to express his views on this subject when establishing that the term "Social-Democrat" was scientifically wrong.
The names of real political parties, however, are never wholly appropriate; the party develops while the name stays."25
The dialectician Engels remained true to dialectics to the end of his days.
Now (at the end of the 19th century) there was a real party, but its name was scientifically wrong.
No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority.
In order to explain this, it is necessary to analyze the economic basis of the withering away of the state.
IX, 1, and which has appeared in Russian in a special edition).
Engels even declared that the Commune was long a state in the proper sense of the word.
But such a view would be fundamentally wrong.
On the basis of what facts, then, can the question of the future development of future communism be dealt with?
There is no trace of an attempt on Marx's part to make up a utopia, to indulge in idle guess-work about what cannot be known.
On the other hand, the 'present-day state' changes with a country's frontier.
'The present-day state' is, therefore, a fiction.
The have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common.
"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.
What, then, is the relation of this dictatorship to democracy?
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy of capitalist society.
ceases to exist", and "it becomes possible to speak of freedom".
Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever.
A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the “state”, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state.
With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to "wither away".
We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away.
With their withering away the state will also wither away.
Marx proceeds to make a concrete analysis of the conditions of life of a society in which there will be no capitalism, and says:
The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals.
The means of production belong to the whole of society.
And with this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products.
“Equality” apparently reigns supreme.
All law is an application of an equal measure to different people who in fact are not alike, are not equal to one another.
That is why the "equal right" is violation of equality and an injustice.
And the conclusion Marx draws is:
To avoid all these defects, the right instead of being equal would have to be unequal."
Such a reproach, as we see, only proves the extreme ignorance of the bourgeois ideologists.
Law can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby."
"Bourgeois law" recognizes them as the private property of individuals.
Socialism converts them into common property.
To that extent--and to that extent alone--"bourgeois law" disappears.
Besides, the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic prerequisites for such a change.
Now, there are no other rules than those of "bourgeois law".
For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.
So long as the state exists there is no freedom.
When there is freedom, there will be no state.
This expropriation will make it possible for the productive forces to develop to a tremendous extent.
But the scientific distinction between socialism and communism is clear.
What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the “first”, or lower, phase of communist society.
Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains "the narrow horizon of bourgeois law".
But in fact, remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society.
Democracy means equality.
But democracy means only formal equality.
By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know.
Democracy is of enormous importance to the working class in its struggle against the capitalists for its emancipation.
If really all take part in the administration of the state, capitalism cannot retain its hold.
All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers.
All citizens becomes employees and workers of a single countrywide state “syndicate”.
The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and pay.
The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary.
For what opportunism needs most of all is that the two questions just mentioned should not be raised at all.
That in itself is a victory for opportunism.
Undoubtedly, an immeasurably larger number of Kautsky’ s works have been translated into Russian than into any other language.
Kautsky’ s letters published in Germany reveal no less hesitancy on his part before he took the field against Bernstein.
Let us take Kautsky’ s first important work against opportunism, Bernstein and the Social-Democratic Programme.
Kautsky refutes Bernstein in detail, but here is a characteristic thing:
A cruder more hideous distortion of Marx’ s idea cannot be imagined.
How, then, did Kautsky proceed in his most detailed refutation of Bernsteinism?
He refrained from analyzing the utter distortion of Marxism by opportunism on this point.
From 1852 to 1891, or for 40 years, Marx and Engels taught the proletariat that it must smash the state machine.
Let us take the next, more mature, work by Kautsky, which was also largely devoted to a refutation of opportunist errors.
It is his pamphlet, The Social Revolution.
He gave much that was exceedingly valuable, but he avoided the question of the state.
A special section in the pamphlet is devoted to the “forms and weapons of the social revolution".
Evidently, it was not without reason that Engels issued a warning, particularly to the German socialists.
against “superstitious reverence” for the state.
Kautsky disposes of the question by using such “impressive-sounding” banalities as:
“Still, it goes without saying that we shall not achieve supremacy under the present conditions.
Undoubtedly, this “goes without saying,” just as the fact that horses eat oats of the Volga flows into the Caspian.
“The most varied form of enterprises—bureaucratic [??], trade unionist, co-operative, private
can exist side by side in socialist society,” Kautsky writes.
There are, for example, enterprises which cannot do without a bureaucratic [??] organization, such as the railways.
The management of other countries may be transferred to the trade unions, and still others may become co-operative enterprises."
In all these enterprises the workers will, of course, “elect delegates who will form a sort of parliament".
Kautsky here displays the same old “superstitious reverence” for the state, and “superstitious belief” in bureaucracy.
After the “revolutionary period of 1789-1871” in Western Europe, he says, a similar period began in the East in 1905.
A world war is approaching with menacing rapidity.
These statements are perfectly clear.
It was in this point-blank form that the question was put in Kautsky’ s controversy with Pannekoek.
The formulation in which Pannekoek presented his ideas suffers from serious defects.
But its meaning is clear nonetheless, and it is interesting to note how Kautsky combated it.
(3) The former demand that the proletariat be trained for revolution by utilizing the present state.
The anarchists reject this.
To cover up his distortion of Marxism, Kautsky behaves like a doctrinaire: he puts forward a “quotation” from Marx himself.
Kautsky’ s “quotation” is neither here nor there.
Centralism is possible with both the old and the new state machine.
And our programme does not demand the abolition of state officials, but that they be elected by the people.
“No, not one of the present ministries will be removed by our political struggle against the government.
This is an obvious trick.
Pannekoek raised the question of revolution.
Both the title of his article and the passages quoted above clearly indicate this.
By skipping to the question of “opposition”, Kautksy substitutes the opportunist for the revolutionary point of view.
What he says means: at present we are an opposition; what we shall be after we have captured power, that we shall see.
Revolution has vanished! And that is exactly what the opportunists wanted.
The point at issue is neither opposition nor political struggle in general, but revolution.
Kautsky slurs over this basic idea of Marxism, or he does not understand it at all.
His question about officials clearly shows that he does not understand the lessons of the Commune or the teachings of Marx.
“We cannot to without officials even in the party and the trade unions...."
We cannot do without officials under capitalism, under the rule of the bourgeoisie.
The proletariat is oppressed, the working people are enslaved by capitalism.
Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.
This is nothing but the purest and most vulgar opportunism: repudiating revolution in deeds, while accepting it in words.
Kautsky’ s thoughts go no further than a “government
These are two vastly different things.
The experience of the Commune has been not only ignored but distorted.
It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality
Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself.
Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
The individual is the product of power.
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts.
Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand
Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes
Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture.
To those who say that escaping is not courageous, we answer: what is not escape and social investment at the same time?
The child is a metaphysical being
Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it
in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window
Bring something incomprehensible into the world!
The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities
In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing
Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?
History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it)
Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool.
Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.
A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds
Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.
I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.
There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you
Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel
The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.
Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.
Philosophy, if it would be a science, cannot borrow its method from a subordinate science like mathematics.
Dialectic has often been regarded as an art, as though it rested on a subjective talent and did not belong to the objectivity of the Notion.
The Corporation comes on to the scene like a second family.
The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea.
The march of God in the world, that is what the state is.
The state is the actuality of concrete freedom.
The strength of the state is lies in the unity of its universal end with the particular interest of individual.
In particularity and individuality, mind glimmers in them as the power of reason in necessity.
Mind is the nature of human beings en masse.
Necessity appears to itself in the shape of freedom.
The constitution of any given nation depends in general on the character and development of its self-consciousness.
The truth of subjectivity is attained only in a subject, and the truth of personality only in a person.
The sovereign works on the middle class at the top, and Corporations work on it at the bottom.
World history is a court of judgement.
World history is not the verdict of mere might, but actualisation of the universal mind.
The history of Mind is its own act.
States, nations, and individuals are all the time the unconscious tools of the world mind at work within them.
Each stage of world-history is a necessary moment in the Idea of the World Mind.
History is mind clothing itself with the form of events.
World-historical actions, culminate with individuals as subjects - living instruments of the World Mind.
It is the right of heroes to found states.
Civilised nations are justified in regarding as barbarians those who lag behind them in institutions.
The object of philosophy is an actuality of which social regulations and conditions, are only the superficial outside.
The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.
Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.
To work, everybody to work, the cause of the world socialist revolution must and will triumph.
Everybody talks about imperialism. But imperialism is merely monopoly capitalism.
It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear
Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women.
And the imperialists? Will they sit with their arms crossed? No!
There is no small enemy nor insignificant force, because no longer are there isolated peoples.
To remain at home and not vote is behind the political situation. It is insufficient.
War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created.
Convert the imperialist war into civil war.
A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its government in a reactionary war.
Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations.
You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on -- into the dustbin of history!
Democracy is indispensable to socialism
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!
Labor is not the source of all wealth.
Nature is just as much the source of use values as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power
But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning.
He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.
Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! 
It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs.
I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words.
Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom
It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms.
Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.
Theory is capable of seizing the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical.
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
But for man the root is man himself
The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man.
'Wretched dogs! They want to treat you like men!' 
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it.
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence.
But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut
The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters.
Then begins an epoch of social revolution.
With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.
This social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist 
The worker's existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity
The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself
Neither of us cares a straw for popularity.
The philosopher, who is himself an abstract form of alienated man, sets himself up as the measure of the alienated world.
In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient.
It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love
He who can buy bravery is brace, though a coward
It makes contradictions embrace
The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour.
Labour's realization is its objectification
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.
It is in fact not the consciousness dominating life but the very life dominating consciousness
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals.
Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence
The object before us, to begin with, material production.
The industrial peak of a people when its main concern is not yet gain, but rather to gain.
Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.
The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual.
Consumption thus appears as a moment of production
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.
What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose
The unity is brought about by force
The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest
Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does.
It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.
Money appears as measure (in Homer, e
g.
oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange,because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange.
But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison
Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; the increase of the one [is] exactly measured by the diminution of necessary labour.
That is it!
Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary
The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value.
Something that is merely negative creates nothing
The South has conquered nothing — but a graveyard.
Reason nevertheless prevails in world history.
Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences.
I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
We suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development
We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.
Le mort saisit le vif!
Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him.
We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.
The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.
The commodity is first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.
The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference.
Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man's need, whether directly as a means of subsistence
an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production
To discover the various use of things is the work of history.
Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.
Every commodity is compelled to chose some other commodity for its equivalent.
Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.
There is a physical relation between physical things.
But it is different with commodities.
Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.
The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.
The religious world is but the reflex of the real world
The capitalist does not produce a commodity for its own sake, nor for the sake of its use value, or his personal consumption
The capitalist's profit is derived from the fact that he has something to sell for which he has paid nothing.
One is conscious that capital generates this new value by its movement in the processes of production and circulation.
But the way which this occurs is cloaked in mystery and appears to originate from hidden qualities inherent in capital itself.
The rate of profit, therefore, depends on two main factors - the rate of surplus-value and the value-composition of capital
The chief means of reducing the time of production is higher labour productivity, which is commonly called industrial progress.
The chief means of reducing the time of circulation is improved communications.
The amount of variable capital invested in his business is something the capitalist himself does not know in most cases
Excretions of consumption are the natural waste matter discharged by the human body, remains of clothing in the form of rags, etc.
Excretions of consumption are of the greatest importance for agriculture.
So far as their utilisation is concerned, there is an enormous waste of them in the capitalist economy
Universal labour is all scientific labour, all discovery and all invention
Violent price fluctuations therefore cause interruptions, great collisions, even catastrophes, in the process of reproduction.
Disguised as profit, surplus value actually denies its origin, losses its character, and becomes unrecognisable.
The transformation of values into prices of production serves to obscure the basis for determining value itself
The real difficulty in formulating the general definition of supply and demand is that it seems to take on the appearance of a tautology
Three individuals are enough for the complete metamorphosis of a commodity, and therefore for the process of sale and purchase taken as a whole
A general increase of wages, all else remaining the same, is tantamount to a reduction in the rate of surplus value
Crude as these ideas are, they arise necessarily out of the inverted aspect which the immanent laws of capitalist production represent in competition.
In commercial practice, the turnover is generally calculated inaccurately.
The rate of profit does not fall because labour becomes less productive, but because it becomes more productive.
The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.
Not too much wealth is produced.
But at times too much wealth is produced in its capitalistic, self-contradictory forms
It does not take more time to deal with large figures than with small ones.
The conceptions of the merchant, stockbroker, and banker, are necessarily quite distorted.
Small profits and quick returns appear to the shopkeeper to be the principal which he follows out of sheer principle.
It is in the circulation process that money develops into capital.
Slavery on the basis of capitalist production is unjust; likewise fraud in the quality of commodities
If all capital were in the hands of the industrial capitalists there would be no such thing as interest and rate of interest.
The labour of exploiting is just as much labour as exploited labour.
Capital is now a thing, but as a thing it is capital.
Money is now pregnant.
A bank-note is nothing but a draft upon a banker, payable at any time to the bearer, and given by the banker in place of private drafts.
"credit accelerates the velocity of the metamorphoses of commodities and thereby the velocity of money circulation."At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction - crises - and thereby the elements of the old mode of production
Business is always thoroughly sound and the campaign is in full swing, until suddenly the debacle takes place.
Ignorant and mistaken bank legislation, such as that of 1844-45, can intensify this money crisis.
But no kind of bank legislation can eliminate a crisis.
Furthermore, in regard to Asia, all capitalist nations are usually simultaneously - directly or indirectly - its debtors
The Acts of 1844 and 1845 are proof of the growing power of these bandits, who are augmented by financiers and stock-jobbers.
Low money-prices for commodities and a low interest rate do not necessarily go together
Most of the banks in Australia, the West Indies, and Canada, have been founded with English capital, and the dividends are payable in England.
The monetary system is essentially a Catholic institution, the credit system essentially Protestant.
"The Scotch hate gold." In the form of paper the monetary existence of commodities is only a social one.
It is Faith that brings salvation.
the wage slave, it is true, can become a creditor's slave in his capacity as consumer.
the tool becomes a machine.
Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds.
The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.
Without the ban on interest churches and cloisters would never have become so affluent.
But a waterfall cannot be created by capital out of itself.
The landlord is always ready to draw a rent, to receive something for nothing.
But capital requires certain conditions to fulfil his wish
Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe
Value is labour
The conversion of surplus-value into profit, as we have seen, is determined as much by the process of circulation as by the process of production
But what is money? Money is not a thing, but a definite form of value, hence, value is again presupposed.
[Here the manuscript breaks off.]
Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.
We see then, commodities are in love with money, but "the course of true love never did run smooth".
Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.
Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates.
Capital is money, capital is commodities.
By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself.
It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
It is in this sense that Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating."
And his money he cannot eat.
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells.— man's heart is a wonderful thing, especially when carried in the purse —
Capital is dead labor,that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic.
Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.
The tool, as we have seen, is not exterminated by the machine.
Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.
In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.
Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however,consciously formulating it.
This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.
If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.
In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.
Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!
But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price.
Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many.
This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration
The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only.
To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.
Every one knows that there are no real forests in England.
The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.
One capitalist always kills many.
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it
This integument is burst asunder.
The knell of capitalist private property sounds.
The expropriators are expropriated.
In a constantly revolving circle every point is simultaneously a point of departure and a point of return.
If we interrupt the rotation, not every point of departure is a point of return.
A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover.
The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation.
As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital.
If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either.
So far as living instruments of labour are concerned, for instance horses, their reproduction is timed by nature itself.
Their average lifetime as instruments of labour is determined by the laws of nature.
As soon as this term has expired they must be replaced by new ones.
A horse cannot be replaced piecemeal; it must be replaced by another horse.
We have just seen that, apart from money-capital, circulating capital is only another name for commodity-capital.
But to the extent that labour power circulates in the market,it is not capital, no form of commodity-capital.
It is not capital at all; the labourer is not a capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin
Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction.
The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market.
The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.
In capitalist society however where social reason always asserts itself only post festum great disturbances may and must constantly occur.
But simultaneously with the development of capitalist production the credit system also develops.
The money-capital which the capitalist cannot as yet employ in his own business is employed by others, who pay him interest for its use.
The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined.
This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.
Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth,it buys as long as it has the means to buy
Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.
The process is so complicated that it offers ever so many occasions for running abnormally.