FREDERICK ENGELS

PRINCIPLES OF
COMMUNISM
FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS
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Paris, 2021

This edition of Principles of Communism is a reprint of the text from

Volume 06, Marx & Engels Collected Works, Lawrence & Wishart,
London, 1976. Some notes have been compiled from Principles of
Communism, First Edition, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1977.
Publisher’s note included is compiled from both L&W London and
FLP Peking.

This book is under license Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

(CC BY-SA 4.0)
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 Publisher’s Note
In 1847 Engels wrote two draft programmes for the Communist League
in the form of a catechism, one in June (Draft of the Communist
Confession of Faith) and the other in October (Principles of Communism).
The Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith is the draft
programme discussed at the First Congress of the Communist League in
London on June 2-9, 1847. The Congress was a final stage in the
reorganisation of the League of the Just — an organisation of German
workers and craftsmen, which was founded in Paris in 1836-37 and soon
acquired an international character, having communities in Germany,
France, Switzerland, Britain and Sweden. The activity of Marx and Engels
directed towards the ideological and organisational unity of the socialists
and advanced workers prompted the leaders of the League (Karl Schapper,
Joseph Moll, Heinrich Bauer), who resided in London from November
1846, to ask for their help in reorganising the League and drafting its new
programme. When Marx and Engels were convinced that the leaders of
the League of the Just were ready to accept the principles of scientific
communism as its programme, they accepted the offer to join the League
made to them late in January 1847. Engels’ active participation in the work
of the Congress (Marx was unable to go to London) affected the course
and the results of its proceedings. The League was renamed the
Communist League, the old motto of the League of the Just “All men are
brothers” was replaced by a new, Marxist one: “Working Men of All
Countries, Unite!” The draft programme and the draft Rules of the League
were approved at the last sitting on June 9, 1847.
Principles of Communism reflects the next stage in the elaboration of
the programme of the Communist League following the Draft of the
Communist Confession of Faith. This new version of the programme was
worked out by Engels on the instructions of the Paris circle authority of
the Communist League. The decision was adopted after Engels’ sharp
criticism at the committee meeting, on October 22, 1847, of the draft
programme drawn up by the “true socialist” M. Hess, which was then
rejected.
 Comparison of the text of the Principles of Communism with that of
the Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith proves that the document
written by Engels at the end of October 1847 is a revised version of the
Draft discussed at the First Congress of the Communist League. The first
six points of the Draft were completely revised. Engels had felt compelled
at that time to make some concessions in them to the as yet immature
views of the League of the Just leaders. Some of these points were omitted
in the Principles, others substantially changed and put in a different order.
In the rest the arrangement of both documents coincides, though there are
several new questions in the Principles: 5, 6, 10-14, 19, 20 and 24-26. In
the Principles, three questions were left unanswered, in two cases with the
notation “remains” (bleibt); this clearly refers to the answers provided in
the Draft.
The Principles of Communism constituted the immediate basis for the
preliminary version of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In his letter
of November 23-24, 1847 to Marx, Engels wrote about the advisability of
drafting the programme in the form of a communist manifesto, rejecting
the old form of a catechism. At the second congress of the Communist
League (November 29-December 8, 1847) Marx and Engels defended the
fundamental scientific principles of communism and were entrusted with
drafting a programme in the form of a manifesto. In writing the Manifesto,
the founders of Marxism made use of propositions formulated in
Principles of Communism.
The Principles of Communism were published for the first time in
English in The Plebs-Magazine, London, in July 1914-January 1915; a
separate edition was put out in Chicago in 1925 (The Daily Workers
Publishing Co), in subsequent years they were published several times
together with the Manifesto.
 Principles of Communism

Question 1: What is communism?

Answer: Communism is the doctrine of the conditions for the
emancipation of the proletariat.
Question 2: What is the proletariat?
Answer: The proletariat is that class of society which procures its
means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labour1 and not
from the profit derived from any capital; whose weal and woe, whose life
and death, whose whole existence depend on the demand for labour,
hence, on the alternation of times of good and bad business, on the
fluctuations resulting from unbridled competition. The proletariat, or class
of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the nineteenth century.
Question 3: Then there have not always been proletarians?
Answer: No. Poor folk and working classes have always existed,2 and
the working classes have for the most part been poor. But such poor, such
workers who live under the conditions just stated, that is, proletarians,
have not always existed, any more than competition has always been free
and unbridled.
Question 4: How did the proletariat arise?

1
In their works of the 1840s and 1850s, prior to Marx having worked out the
theory of surplus value, Marx and Engels used the terms “value of labour”, “price
of labour”, “sale of labour” which, as Engels noted in 1891 in the introduction to
Marx’s pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital, “from the point of view of the later
works were inadequate and even wrong”. After he had proved that the worker
sells to the capitalist not his labour but his labour power Marx used more precise
terms. In later works Marx and Engels used the terms “value of labour power”,
“price of labour power”, “sale of labour power.”
2
The reference is to class-divided societies. Subsequently Engels thought it
necessary to make special mention of the fact that in their works written in the
1840s, while touching upon the problem of class antagonisms and class struggle
in history, Marx and he made no mention of the primitive classless stage of human
development because the history of that stage had as yet been but little studied.
(See Engels’ note to the English edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,
1888)

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 Principles of Communism

Answer: The proletariat arose as a result of the industrial revolution

which took place in England in the latter half of the last century and which
has repeated itself since then in all the civilised countries of the world.
This industrial revolution was brought about by the invention of the steam-
engine, of various spinning machines, of the power-loom, and of a great
number of other mechanical devices. These machines which were very
expensive and, consequently, could only be purchased by big capitalists,
changed the entire hitherto existing mode of production and supplanted
the former workers because machines produced cheaper and better
commodities than could the workers with their imperfect spinning-wheels
and hand-looms. Thus, these machines delivered industry entirely into the
hands of the big capitalists and rendered the workers' scanty property
(tools, looms, etc.) quite worthless, so that the capitalists soon had their
hands on everything and the workers were left with nothing. In this way
the factory system was introduced into the manufacture of clothing
materials.—Once the impetus had been given to the introduction of
machinery and the factory system, this system was soon applied to all the
other branches of industry, notably the calico and book-printing trades,
pottery, and hardware industry. There was more and more division of
labour among the individual workers, so that the worker who formerly had
made a whole article now produced only a part of it. This division of
labour made it possible to supply products more speedily and therefore
more cheaply. It reduced the activity of each worker to a very simple,
constantly repeated mechanical operation, which could be performed not
only just as well but even much better by a machine. In this way, all these
branches of industry came one after another under the domination of
steam-power, machinery, and the factory system, just like spinning and
weaving. But they thus fell at the same time completely into the hands of
the big capitalists, and here too the workers were deprived of the last shred
of independence. Gradually, in addition to actual manufacture, the
handicrafts likewise fell increasingly under the domination of the factory
system, for here also the big capitalists more and more supplanted the
small craftsmen by the establishment of large workshops, in which many
savings on costs can be made and there can be a very high division of
labour. Thus we have now reached the point when in the civilised
countries almost all branches of labour are carried on under the factory
system, and in almost all branches handicraft and manufacture have been

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 Principles of Communism

ousted by large-scale industry.—As a result, the former middle classes,

especially the smaller master handicraftsmen, have been increasingly
ruined, the former position of the workers has been completely changed,
and two new classes which are gradually swallowing up all other classes
have come into being, namely:
I. The class of big capitalists who already now in all civilised countries
almost exclusively own all the means of subsistence and the raw materials
and instruments (machinery, factories, etc.), needed for the production of
these means of subsistence. This class is the bourgeois class or the
bourgeoisie.
II. The class of the completely propertyless, who are compelled
therefore to sell their labour to the bourgeois in order to obtain the
necessary means of subsistence in exchange. This class is called the class
of the proletarians or the proletariat.
Question 5: Under what conditions does this sale of the labour of the
proletarians to the bourgeois take place?
Answer: Labour is a commodity like any other and its price is
determined by the same laws as that of any other commodity. The price of
a commodity under the domination of large-scale industry or of free
competition, which, as we shall see, comes to the same thing, is on the
average always equal to the cost of production of that commodity. The
price of labour is, therefore, likewise equal to the cost of production of
labour. The cost of production of labour consists precisely of the amount
of the means of subsistence required for the worker to maintain himself in
a condition in which he is capable of working and to prevent the working
class from dying out. Therefore, the worker will not receive for his labour
any more than is necessary for that purpose; the price of labour, or wages,
will be the lowest, the minimum required for subsistence. Since business
is now worse, now better, the worker will receive now more, now less, just
as the factory owner receives now more, now less for his commodity. But
just as on the average between good times and bad the factory owner
receives for his commodity neither more nor less than the cost of its
production, so also the worker will on the average receive neither more
nor less than this minimum. This economic law of wages will come to be

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 Principles of Communism

more stringently applied the more all branches of labour are taken over by
large-scale industry.
Question 6: What working classes existed before the industrial
revolution?
Answer: Depending on the different stages of the development of
society, the working classes lived in different conditions and stood in
different relations to the possessing and ruling classes. In ancient times the
working people were the slaves of their owners, just as they still are in
many backward countries and even in the southern part of the United
States. In the Middle Ages they were the serfs of the landowning nobility,
just as they still are in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages
and up to the industrial revolution there were in the towns also journeymen
in the service of petty-bourgeois craftsmen, and with the development of
manufacture there gradually emerged manufactory workers, who were
already employed by the bigger capitalists.
Question 7: In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave?
Answer: The slave is sold once and for all, the proletarian has to sell
himself by the day and by the hour. Being the property of one master, the
individual slave has, since it is in the interest of this master, a guaranteed
subsistence, however wretched it may be; the individual proletarian, the
property, so to speak, of the whole bourgeois class, whose labour is only
bought from him when somebody needs it, has no guaranteed subsistence.
This subsistence is guaranteed only to the proletarian class as a whole.
The slave stands outside competition, the proletarian stands within it and
feels all its fluctuations. The slave is accounted a thing, not a member of
civil society; the proletarian is recognised as a person, as a member of civil
society. Thus, the slave may have a better subsistence than the proletarian,
but the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of development of society and
himself stands at a higher stage than the slave. The slave frees himself by
abolishing, among all the private property relationships, only the
relationship of slavery and thereby only then himself becomes a
proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private
property in general.
Question 8: In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf?

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 Principles of Communism

Answer: The serf has the possession and use of an instrument of

production, a piece of land, in return for handing over a portion of the yield
or for the performance of work. The proletarian works with instruments
of production belonging to another person for the benefit of this other
person in return for receiving a portion of the yield. The serf gives, to the
proletarian is given. The serf has a guaranteed subsistence, the proletarian
has not. The serf stands outside competition, the proletarian stands within
it. The serf frees himself either by running away to the town and there
becoming a handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money instead of
labour and products and becoming a free tenant; or by driving out his
feudal lord and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering in one
way or another into the possessing class and competition. The proletarian
frees himself by doing away with competition, private property and all
class distinctions.
Question 9: In what way does the proletarian differ from the
handicraftsman?3
Answer: As opposed to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman,
who still existed nearly everywhere during the last century and still exists
here and there, is at most a temporary proletarian. His aim is to acquire
capital himself and so to exploit other workers. He can often achieve this
aim where the craft guilds still exist or where freedom to follow a trade
has not yet led to the organisation of handwork on a factory basis and to
intense competition. But as soon as the factory system is introduced into
handwork and competition is in full swing, this prospect is eliminated and
the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. The
handicraftsman therefore frees himself either by becoming a bourgeois or
in general passing over into the middle class, or, by becoming a proletarian
as a result of competition (as now happens in most cases) and joining the
movement of the proletariat—i.e., the more or less conscious communist
movement.

3
Half a page is left blank by Engels in the manuscript. The answer printed here
is from the answer to the same question from the Draft of the Communist
Confession of Faith.

5
 Principles of Communism

Question 10: In what way does the proletarian differ from the
manufactory worker?
Answer: The manufactory worker of the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries almost everywhere still owned an instrument of production, his
loom, the family spinning-wheels, and a little plot of land which he
cultivated in his leisure hours. The proletarian has none of these things.
The manufactory worker lives almost always in the country and in more
or less patriarchal relations with his landlord or his employer; the
proletarian lives mostly in large towns, and stands to his employer in a
purely money relationship. The manufactory worker is torn up from his
patriarchal relations by large-scale industry, loses the property he still has
and thereby only then himself becomes a proletarian.
Question 11: What were the immediate results of the industrial
revolution and the division of society into bourgeois and proletarians?
Answer: Firstly, owing to the continual cheapening of the price of
industrial products as a result of machine labour, the old system of
manufacture or industry founded upon manual labour was completely
destroyed in all countries of the world. All semi-barbarian countries,
which until now had been more or less outside historical development and
whose industry had until now been based on manufacture, were thus
forcibly torn out of their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities
of the English and let their own manufactory workers go to ruin. Thus
countries that for thousands of years had made no progress, for example
India, were revolutionised through and through, and even China is now
marching towards a revolution. It has reached the point that a new machine
invented today in England, throws millions of workers in China out of
work within a year. Large-scale industry has thus brought all the peoples
of the earth into relationship with one another, thrown all the small local
markets into the world market, prepared the way everywhere for
civilisation and progress, and brought it about that everything that happens
in the civilised countries must have its repercussions on all other countries.
So if now in England or France the workers liberate themselves, this must
lead to revolutions in all other countries, which sooner or later will also
bring about the liberation of the workers in those countries.

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 Principles of Communism

Secondly, wherever large-scale industry replaced manufacture, the

industrial revolution developed the bourgeoisie, its wealth and its power,
to the highest degree and made it the first class in the land. The result was
that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie obtained political power and
ousted the hitherto ruling classes—the aristocracy, the guild-burghers and
the absolute monarchy representing both. The bourgeoisie annihilated the
power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing entails or the ban on
the sale of landed property, and all privileges of the nobility. It destroyed
the power of the guild-burghers by abolishing all guilds and craft
privileges. In place of both it put free competition, that is, a state of society
in which everyone has the right to engage in any branch of industry he
likes, and where nothing can hinder him in carrying it on except lack of
the necessary capital. The introduction of free competition is therefore the
public declaration that henceforward the members of society are only
unequal in so far as their capital is unequal, that capital has become the
decisive power and therefore the capitalists, the bourgeois, have become
the first class in society. But free competition is necessary for the
beginning of large-scale industry since it is the only state of society in
which large-scale industry can grow. The bourgeoisie having thus
annihilated the social power of the nobility and the guild-burghers,
annihilated their political power as well. Having become the first class in
society, the bourgeoisie proclaimed itself also the first class in the political
sphere. It did this by establishing the representative system, which rests
upon bourgeois equality before the law and the legal recognition of free
competition, and which in European countries was introduced in the form
of constitutional monarchy. Under these constitutional monarchies those
only are electors who possess a certain amount of capital, that is to say,
the bourgeois; these bourgeois electors elect the deputies, and these
bourgeois deputies, by means of the right to refuse taxes, elect a bourgeois
government.
Thirdly, the industrial revolution built up the proletariat in the same
measure in which it built up the bourgeoisie. In the same proportion in
which the bourgeois became wealthier, the proletarians became more
numerous. For since proletarians can only be employed by capital and
since capital only increases when it employs labour, the growth of the
proletariat keeps exact pace with the growth of capital. At the same time

7
 Principles of Communism

it concentrates the bourgeois as well as the proletarians in large cities, in

which industry can most profitably be carried on, and through this
throwing together of great masses in one place it makes the proletarians
conscious of their power. Further, the more it develops, the more machines
are invented which displace manual labour, the more large-scale industry,
as we already said, depresses wages to their minimum, and thereby makes
the condition of the proletariat more and more unbearable. Thus, through
the growing discontent of the proletariat, on the one hand, and through its
growing power, on the other, the industrial revolution prepares a social
revolution by the proletariat.
Question 12: What were the further results of the industrial revolution?
Answer: In the steam-engine and the other machines large-scale
industry created the means of increasing industrial production in a short
time and at slight expense to an unlimited extent. With this facility of
production the free competition necessarily resulting from large-scale
industry very soon assumed an extremely intense character; numbers of
capitalists launched into industry, and very soon more was being produced
than could be used. The result was that the goods manufactured could not
be sold, and a so-called trade crisis ensued. Factories had to stand idle,
factory owners went bankrupt, and the workers lost their bread.
Everywhere there was the greatest misery. After a while the surplus
products were sold, the factories started working again, wages went up,
and gradually business was more brisk than ever. But before long too
many commodities were again produced, another crisis ensued, and ran
the same course as the previous one. Thus since the beginning of this
century the state of industry has continually fluctuated between periods of
prosperity and periods of crisis, and almost regularly every five to seven
years a similar crisis has occurred,4 and every time it has entailed the

4
In the Appendix to the 1887 American edition of The Condition of the Working
Class in England (first published in 1845) and also in the Preface to the English
edition and in the Preface to the Second German edition (1892), Engels wrote
about the recurrence of crises: “The recurring period of the great industrial crisis
is stated in the text as five years. This was the period apparently indicated by the
course of events from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history from 1842 to 1868
has shown that the real period is one of ten years; that the intermediate revulsions
were secondary, and tended more and more to disappear.”

8
 Principles of Communism

greatest misery for the workers, general revolutionary ferment, and the
greatest danger to the entire existing system.
Question 13: What conclusions can be drawn from these regularly
recurring trade crises?
Answer: Firstly, that although in the initial stages of its development
large-scale industry itself created free competition, it has now nevertheless
outgrown free competition; that competition and in general the carrying
on of industrial production by individuals have become a fetter upon large-
scale industry which it must and will break; that large-scale industry, so
long as it is conducted on its present basis, can only survive through a
general confusion repeating itself every seven years which each time
threatens all civilisation, not merely plunging the proletarians into misery
but also ruining a great number of bourgeois; therefore that either large-
scale industry itself must be given up, which is utterly impossible, or that
it absolutely necessitates a completely new organisation of society, in
which industrial production is no longer directed by individual factory
owners, competing one against the other, but by the whole of society
according to a fixed plan and according to the needs of all.
Secondly, that large-scale industry and the unlimited expansion of
production which it makes possible can bring into being a social order in
which so much of all the necessities of life will be produced that every
member of society will thereby be enabled to develop and exercise all his
powers and abilities in perfect freedom. Thus, precisely that quality of
large-scale industry which in present society produces all misery and all
trade crises is the very quality which under a different social organisation
will destroy that same misery and these disastrous fluctuations.
Thus it is most clearly proved:
1. that from now on all these ills are to be attributed only to the social
order which no longer corresponds to the existing conditions;
2. that the means are available to abolish these ills completely through
a new social order.
Question 14: What kind of new social order will this have to be?

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 Principles of Communism

Answer: Above all, it will have to take the running of industry and all
branches of production in general out of the hands of separate individuals
competing with each other and instead will have to ensure that all these
branches of production are run by society as a whole, i.e., for the social
good, according to a social plan and with the participation of all members
of society. It will therefore do away with competition and replace it by
association. Since the running of industry by individuals had private
ownership as its necessary consequence and since competition is nothing
but the manner in which industry is run by individual private owners,
private ownership cannot be separated from the individual running of
industry and competition. Hence, private ownership will also have to be
abolished, and in its stead there will be common use of all the instruments
of production and the distribution of all products by common agreement,
or the so-called community of property. The abolition of private
ownership is indeed the most succinct and characteristic summary of the
transformation of the entire social system necessarily following from the
development of industry, and it is therefore rightly put forward by the
Communists as their main demand.
Question 15: The abolition of private property was therefore not
possible earlier?
Answer: No. Every change in the social order, every revolution in
property relations, has been the necessary result of the creation of new
productive forces which would no longer conform to the old property
relations. Private property itself arose in this way. For private property has
not always existed, but when towards the end of the Middle Ages a new
mode of production appeared in the form of manufacture which could not
be subordinated to the then existing feudal and guild property,
manufacture, having outgrown the old property relations, created a new
form of ownership—private ownership. For manufacture and the first
stage of development of large-scale industry, no other form of ownership
was possible than private ownership and no other order of society than that
founded upon private ownership. So long as it is not possible to produce
so much that not only is there enough for all, but also a surplus for the
increase of social capital and for the further development of the productive
forces, so long must there always be a ruling class disposing of the

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 Principles of Communism

productive forces of society, and a poor, oppressed class. How these

classes are composed will depend upon the stage of development of
production. In the Middle Ages, which were dependent upon agriculture,
we find the lord and the serf; the towns of the later Middle Ages show us
the master guildsman and the journeyman and day labourer; the
seventeenth century has the manufacturer and the manufactory worker; the
nineteenth century the big factory owner and the proletarian. It is obvious
that hitherto the productive forces had not yet been so far developed that
enough could be produced for all or to make private property a fetter, a
barrier, to these productive forces. Now, however, when the development
of large-scale industry has, firstly, created capital and productive forces on
a scale hitherto unheard of and the means are available to increase these
productive forces in a short time to an infinite extent; when, secondly,
these productive forces are concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois
whilst the great mass of the people are more and more becoming
proletarians, and their condition more wretched and unendurable in the
same measure in which the riches of the bourgeois increase; when, thirdly,
these powerful productive forces that can easily be increased have so
enormously outgrown private property and the bourgeois that at every
moment they provoke the most violent disturbances in the social order—
only now has the abolition of private property become not only possible
but even absolutely necessary.
Question 16: Will it be possible to bring about the abolition of private
property by peaceful methods?
Answer: It is to be desired that this could happen, and Communists
certainly would be the last to resist it. The Communists know only too
well that all conspiracies are not only futile but even harmful. They know
only too well that revolutions are not made deliberately and arbitrarily, but
that everywhere and at all times they have been the necessary outcome of
circumstances entirely independent of the will and the leadership of
particular parties and entire classes. But they also see that the development
of the proletariat is in nearly every civilised country forcibly suppressed,
and that thus the opponents of the Communists are working with all their
might towards a revolution. Should the oppressed proletariat in the end be

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 Principles of Communism

goaded into a revolution, we Communists will then defend the cause of

the proletarians by deed just as well as we do now byword.
Question 17: Will it be possible to abolish private property at one
stroke?
Answer: No, such a thing would be just as impossible as at one stroke
to increase the existing productive forces to the degree necessary for
instituting community of property. Hence, the proletarian revolution,
which in all probability is impending, will transform existing society only
gradually, and be able to abolish private property only when the necessary
quantity of the means of production has been created.
Question 18: What will be the course of this revolution?
Answer: In the first place it will inaugurate a democratic constitution
and thereby, directly or indirectly, the political rule of the proletariat.
Directly in England, where the proletariat already constitutes the majority
of the people. Indirectly in France and in Germany, where the majority of
the people consists not only of proletarians but also of small peasants and
urban petty bourgeois, who are only now being proletarianised and in all
their political interests are becoming more and more dependent on the
proletariat and therefore soon will have to conform to the demands of the
proletariat. This will perhaps involve a second fight, but one that can end
only in the victory of the proletariat.
Democracy would be quite useless to the proletariat if it were not
immediately used as a means of carrying through further measures directly
attacking private ownership and securing the means of subsistence of the
proletariat. Chief among these measures, already made necessary by the
existing conditions, are the following:
1. Limitation of private ownership by means of progressive taxation,
high inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance by collateral lines
(brothers, nephews, etc.), compulsory loans and so forth.
2. Gradual expropriation of landed proprietors, factory owners, railway
and shipping magnates, partly through competition on the part of state
industry and partly directly through compensation in assignations.

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 Principles of Communism

3. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels against the

majority of the people.
4. Organisation of the labour or employment of the proletarians on
national estates, in national factories and workshops, thereby putting an
end to competition among the workers themselves and compelling the
factory owners, as long as they still exist, to pay the same increased wages
as the State.
5. Equal liability to work for all members of society until complete
abolition of private ownership. Formation of industrial armies, especially
for agriculture.
6. Centralisation of the credit and banking systems in the hands of the
State by means of a national bank with state capital and the suppression of
all private banks and bankers.
7. Increase of national factories, workshops, railways, and ships,
cultivation of all uncultivated land and improvement of land already
cultivated in the same proportion in which the capital and workers at the
disposal of the nation increase.
8. Education of all children, as soon as they are old enough to do
without the first maternal care, in national institutions and at the expense
of the nation. Education combined with production.
9. The erection of large palaces on national estates as common
dwellings for communities of citizens engaged in industry as well as
agriculture, and combining the advantages of both urban and rural life
without the one-sidedness and disadvantages of either.
10. The demolition of all insanitary and badly built dwellings and town
districts.
11. Equal right of inheritance to be enjoyed by illegitimate and
legitimate children.
12. Concentration of all means of transport in the hands of the nation.
Of course, all these measures cannot be carried out at once. But one
will always lead on to the other. Once the first radical onslaught upon

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 Principles of Communism

private ownership has been made, the proletariat will see itself compelled
to go always further, to concentrate all capital, all agriculture, all industry,
all transport, and all exchange more and more in the hands of the State.
All these measures work towards such results; and they will become
realisable and will develop their centralising consequences in the same
proportion in which the productive forces of the country will be multiplied
by the labour of the proletariat. Finally, when all capital, all production,
and all exchange are concentrated in the hands of the nation, private
ownership will automatically have ceased to exist, money will have
become superfluous, and production will have so increased and men will
be so much changed that the last forms of the old social relations will also
be able to fall away.
Question 19: Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one
country alone?
Answer: No. Large-scale industry, already by creating the world
market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially the
civilised peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens to
another. Further, in all civilised countries large-scale industry has so
levelled social development that in all these countries the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat have become the two decisive classes of society and the
struggle between them the main struggle of the day. The communist
revolution will therefore be no merely national one; it will be a revolution
taking place simultaneously in all civilised countries, that is, at least in
England, America, France and Germany.5 In each of these countries it will

5
The conclusion that the victory of the proletarian revolution was possible only
simultaneously in the advanced capitalist countries, and hence impossible in one
country alone, first made by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology and most
definitely formulated in the Principles of Communism, was arrived at in the period
of pre-monopoly capitalism. However, in their later works Marx and Engels
found it necessary to give this proposition a more flexible form stressing the fact
that a proletarian revolution should be understood as a considerably prolonged
and complex process which could develop initially in several main capitalist
countries. See, for example, K. Marx, “Revelations about the Cologne Trial”
(1853), Marx’s letter of February 12, 1870 to Engels and Engels’ letter of
September 12, 1882 to Kautsky. Under new historical conditions, Lenin,
proceeding from the law of the uneven economic and political development of

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 Principles of Communism

develop more quickly or more slowly according to whether the country

has a more developed industry, more wealth, and a more considerable
mass of productive forces. It will therefore be slowest and most difficult
to carry out in Germany, quickest and easiest in England. It will also have
an important effect upon the other countries of the world, and will
completely change and greatly accelerate their previous manner of
development. It is a worldwide revolution and will therefore be worldwide
in scope.
Question 20: What will be the consequences of the final abolition of
private ownership?
Answer: Above all, through society's taking out of the hands of the
private capitalists the use of all the productive forces and means of
communication as well as the exchange and distribution of products and
managing them according to a plan corresponding to the means available
and the needs of the whole of society, all the evil consequences of the
present running of large-scale industry will be done away with. There will
be an end of crises; the extended production, which under the present
system of society means overproduction and is such a great cause of
misery, will then not even be adequate and will have to be expanded much
further. Instead of creating misery, overproduction beyond the.immediate
needs of society will mean the satisfaction of the needs of all, create new
needs and at the same time the means to satisfy them. It will be the
condition and the cause of new advances, and it will achieve these
advances without thereby, as always hitherto, bringing the order of society
into confusion. Once liberated from the pressure of private ownership,
large-scale industry will develop on a scale that will make its present level
of development seem as paltry as seems the manufacturing system
compared with the large-scale industry of our time. This development of
industry will provide society with a sufficient quantity of products to
satisfy the needs of all. Similarly agriculture, which is also hindered by
the pressure of private ownership and the parcelling of land from

capitalism in the era of imperialism, came to the conclusion that the socialist
revolution could first triumph either in only a few countries or even in a single
country. This conclusion was first formulated by Lenin in his article “On the
Slogan of the United States of Europe” (1915).

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 Principles of Communism

introducing the improvements already available and scientific

advancements, will be given a quite new impulse, and place at society's
disposal an ample quantity of products. Thus society will produce enough
products to be able so to arrange distribution that the needs of all its
members will be satisfied. The division of society into various
antagonistic classes will thereby become superfluous. Not only will it
become superfluous, it is even incompatible with the new social order.
Classes came into existence through the division of labour and the division
of labour in its hitherto existing form will entirely disappear. For in order
to bring industrial and agricultural production to the level described,
mechanical and chemical aids alone are not enough; the abilities of the
people who set these aids in motion must also be developed to a
corresponding degree. Just as in the last century the peasants and the
manufactory workers changed their entire way of life, and themselves
became quite different people when they were drawn into large-scale
industry, so also will the common management of production by the whole
of society and the resulting new development of production require and
also produce quite different people. The common management of
production cannot be effected by people as they are today, each one being
assigned to a single branch of production, shackled to it, exploited by it,
each having developed only one of his abilities at the cost of all the others
and knowing only one branch, or only a branch of a branch of the total
production. Even present-day industry finds less and less use for such
people. Industry carried on in common and according to plan by the whole
of society presupposes moreover people of all-round development,
capable of surveying the entire system of production. Thus the division of
labour making one man a peasant, another a shoemaker, a third a factory
worker, a fourth a stockjobber, which has already been undermined by
machines, will completely disappear. Education will enable young people
quickly to go through the whole system of production, it will enable them
to pass from one branch of industry to another according to the needs of
society or their own inclinations. It will therefore free them from that one-
sidedness which the present division of labour stamps on each one of
them. Thus the communist organisation of society will give its members
the chance of an all-round exercise of abilities that have received all-round
development. With this, the various classes will necessarily disappear.
Thus the communist organisation of society is, on the one hand,

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 Principles of Communism

incompatible with the existence of classes and, on the other, the very
establishment of this society furnishes the means to do away with these
class differences.
It follows from this that the antagonism between town and country will
likewise disappear. The carrying on of agriculture and industrial
production by the same people, instead of by two different classes, is
already for purely material reasons an essential condition of communist
association. The scattering of the agricultural population over the
countryside, along with the crowding of the industrial population into the
big towns, is a state which corresponds only to an undeveloped stage of
agriculture and industry, an obstacle to all further development which is
already now making itself very keenly felt.
The general association of all members of society for the common and
planned exploitation of the productive forces, the expansion of production
to a degree where it will satisfy the needs of all, the termination of the
condition where the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of others,
the complete annihilation of classes and their antagonisms, the all-round
development of the abilities of all the members of society through doing
away with the hitherto existing division of labour, through industrial
education, through change of activity, through the participation of all in
the enjoyments provided by all, through the merging of town and
country—such are the main results of the abolition of private property.
Question 21: What influence will the communist order of society have
upon the family?
Answer: It will make the relation between the sexes a purely private
relation which concerns only the persons involved, and in which society
has no call to interfere. It is able to do this because it abolishes private
property and educates children communally, thus destroying the twin
foundation of hitherto existing marriage—the dependence through private
property of the wife upon the husband and of the children upon the parents.
Here also is the answer to the outcry of moralising philistines against the
communist community of women. Community of women is a relationship
that belongs altogether to bourgeois society and is completely realised
today in prostitution. But prostitution is rooted in private property and falls

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 Principles of Communism

with it. Thus instead of introducing the community of women, communist

organisation puts an end to it.
Question 22: What will be the attitude of the communist organisation
towards existing nationalities?6
Answer: The nationalities of the peoples who join together according
to the principle of community will be just as much compelled by this union
to merge with one another and thereby supersede themselves as the
various differences between estates and classes disappear through the
superseding of their basis—private property.
Question 23: What will be its attitude towards existing religions?7
Answer: All religions which have existed hitherto were expressions of
historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of
peoples. But communism is that stage of historical development which
makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them.
Question 24: In what way do Communists differ from socialists?
Answer: The so-called socialists fall into three groups.
The first group consists of adherents of feudal and patriarchal society
which has been or is still being daily destroyed by large-scale industry,
world trade and the bourgeois society they have both brought into
existence. From the ills of present-day society this group draws the
conclusion that feudal and patriarchal society should be restored because
it was free from these ills. Directly or deviously, all its proposals make for
this goal. Despite all its professions of sympathy and its bewailing the
misery of the proletariat, this group of reactionary socialists will be
strongly opposed by the Communists, because
1. it is striving after something utterly impossible;

6
The manuscript has the answer to this question as “remains.” Apparently this
means that the answer to this question remains the same as in the Draft of a
Communist Confession of Faith. The same has been printed here.
7
Same as Note 6.

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 Principles of Communism

2. it seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guild-masters and

the manufacturers, with their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs,
officials, soldiers and priests, a society which was indeed free from the
vices of present society, but brought at least as many other evils in its train
and did not even hold out the prospect of the emancipation of the
oppressed workers through a communist organisation;
3. it always gives away its real intentions every time the proletariat
becomes revolutionary and communist, when it immediately allies itself
with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians.
The second group consists of adherents of present society in whom the
evils inseparable from it have awakened fears for its survival. They
therefore endeavour to preserve present society but to remove the evils
bound up with it. With this end in view, some of them propose measures
of mere charity, and others grandiose systems of reform which, under the
pretext of reorganising society, would retain the foundations of present
society, and thus present society itself. These bourgeois socialists will also
have to be continuously fought by the Communists, since they work for
the enemies of the Communists and defend the society which it is the
Communists' aim to destroy.
Finally, the third group consists of democratic socialists, who in the
same way as the Communists desire part of the measures listed in Question
…8 not, however, as a means of transition to communism but as measures
sufficient to abolish the misery of present society and to cause its evils to
disappear. These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not
yet sufficiently enlightened regarding the conditions of the emancipation
of their class, or they are members of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which,
until the winning of democracy and the realisation of the socialist
measures following upon it, has in many respects the same interest as the
proletariat. At moments of action the Communists will, therefore, have to
reach an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general for
the time being pursue as much as possible a common policy with them,
insofar as these democratic socialists do not enter the service of the ruling

8
The manuscript has a blank space here. See answer to Question 18.

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 Principles of Communism

bourgeoisie and attack the Communists. It is obvious that this common

action does not exclude the discussion of differences with them.
Question 25: What is the attitude of the Communists towards the other
political parties of our day?
Answer: This attitude differs from country to country.—In England,
France, and Belgium, where the bourgeoisie rules, the Communists still
have for the time being a common interest with the various democratic
parties, which is all the greater the more in the socialist measures they are
now everywhere advocating the democrats approach the aims of the
Communists, that is, the more clearly and definitely they uphold the
interests of the proletariat and the more they rely on the proletariat. In
England, for instance, the Chartists,9 who are all workers, are incalculably
nearer to the Communists than are the democratic petty bourgeois or so-
called radicals.
In America, where a democratic constitution has been introduced, the
Communists must make common cause with the party that will turn this
constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interest of the
proletariat, that is, with the national agrarian reformers.10

9
The Chartists were participants in the political movement of the British workers
which lasted from the 1830s to the middle 1850s and had as its slogan the adoption
of a People’s Charter, demanding universal franchise and a series of conditions
guaranteeing voting rights for all workers. Lenin defined Chartism as the world’s
“first broad, truly mass and politically organized proletarian revolutionary
movement.” (See Lenin, “The Third International and its Place in History”
(1919).) The decline of the Chartist movement was due to the strengthening of
Britain’s industrial and commercial monopoly and the bribing of the upper
stratum of the working class (“the labour aristocracy”) by the British bourgeoisie
out of its super-profits. Both factors led to the strengthening of opportunist
tendencies in this stratum as expressed, in particular, by the refusal of the trade
union leaders to support Chartism.
10
The reference is to Young America — an organisation of American craftsmen
and workers; it formed the nucleus of the mass National Reform Association
founded in 1845. In the second half of the 1840s the Association agitated for land
reform, proclaiming as its aim free allotment of a plot of 160 acres to every
working man; it came out against slave-owning planters and land profiteers. It
also put forward demands for a ten-hour working day, abolition of slavery, of the

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 Principles of Communism

In Switzerland the radicals, although still a very mixed party, are yet
the only people with whom the Communists can have anything to do, and,
further, among these radicals those in the cantons of Vaud and of Geneva
are the most advanced.
Finally, in Germany the decisive struggle between the bourgeoisie and
the absolute monarchy is still to come. Since, however, the Communists
cannot count on the decisive struggle between themselves and the
bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie rules, it is in the interests of the
Communists to help bring the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in
order as soon as possible to overthrow them again. The Communists must
therefore always take the side of the liberal bourgeois against the
governments but they must ever be on their guard against sharing the self-
deceptions of the bourgeois or believing their false assurances about the
benefits which the victory of the bourgeoisie will bring to the proletariat.
The only advantages which the victory of the bourgeoisie will provide for
the Communists will be: 1. various concessions which make easier for the
Communists the defence, discussion and spreading of their principles and
thus the unification of the proletariat into a closely knit, militant and
organised class, and 2. the certainty that from the day when the absolute
governments fall, comes the turn for the fight between bourgeois and
proletarians. From that day onwards the party policy of the Communists
will be the same as in the countries where the bourgeoisie already rules.

Written at the end of October 1847

First published as a separate edition in 1914
Translated from German

standing army, etc. Many German emigrant craftsmen, including members of the
League of the Just, took part in the movement headed by the National Reform
Association. By 1846 the movement among the German workers began to
subside. One of the reasons for this was the activity of Kriege’s group whose “true
socialism” diverted the German emigrants from the struggle for democratic aims.

21