PDF Summary:The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx

Manifesto of the Communist Party, better known as The Communist Manifesto, outlines the beliefs of the Communists and the program of the Communist League, a worker’s party. The Communists were concerned about social and political inequality—conditions that still exist today—and via the manifesto, share their concerns and proposed solutions.

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1. Create a progressive or graduated income tax. This will spread wealth more equally among all members of the population and eliminate classes.
2. Abolish inheritance. This will eliminate wealth being held by a few instead of distributed among everyone.
3. Take away the property of emigrants and rebels. Emigrants who are living abroad and left possessions behind obviously aren’t currently using them, so they can be better used by the general population. Rebels who oppose the Proletariat also shouldn’t be allowed to have property.
4. Create a national bank using state capital. Private banks simply hold money. A national bank could use money to improve social conditions.
5. Put the state in charge of communication and transportation. If the state controls these things, rather than an oppressor, everyone will have access to them.
6. Expand and improve the state’s control of infrastructure and land. Currently, people aren’t making good use of resources. The state can allocate resources in a way that most benefits everyone.
7. Require everyone to work and require working conditions to be decent. This will result in everyone contributing to society.
8. Decentralize jobs from cities by combining agriculture and manufacturing. This will reduce geographic inequity and make better use of resources.
9. Abolish child labor, create public schools, and give all children free education. This will improve the lives of children.

(Shortform note: We’ve added explanations of each measure, based on widely-held interpretations.)

Responses to Criticism

Here are some criticisms of Communists and how they respond:

• Communism encourages universal laziness. If abolishing private property led to universal laziness, everyone would already be lazy, because laborers make up most of the population and don’t have any private property.
• Communism abolishes culture, freedom, family structures, and countries. The Proletariat already lacks these things. The Bourgeoisie has abolished them all in the course of viewing laborers as commodities rather than people.
• Communism upheaves the educational system. The Communists simply want school to be available to everyone, not just the Bourgeoisie.
• Communism makes women collective property. This criticism is rooted in misdefinition. Because the Bourgeoisie consider their wives to be property or tools, when they hear the Communists say they want to abolish private property and use tools for the common good, the Bourgeoisie think that their wives are included. However, the Communists don’t consider women to be property or tools.
• Communism destroys religion. Religion’s ideas and values always change and evolve over time. Communism isn’t changing anything that isn’t already editable.

The Communist League and Other Groups

At the time of publication, the Manifesto of the Communist Party wouldn’t have been described as socialist. In 1848, Marx defines “socialists” as non-working class members who look for help from classes other than the ones they belong to. Socialists are interested in improving social conditions, and they think it’s possible to do so by improving the existing political system, rather than through the total social change the Communists call for. The manifesto discusses several kinds of socialism:

• Feudal and petty bourgeois (lower middle class) socialism. These socialists support the Proletariat, but only because the Proletariat have the best chance of taking down the Bourgeoisie, and because the Bourgeoisie were responsible for the fall of both the aristocrats and lower middle class. These socialists are interested in their own ends.
• German/“true” socialism. In 1848, the German Bourgeoisie class isn’t fully developed yet. As a result, German socialism is theoretical and based on French socialist literature. This socialism is more about human interests in general since Germany hadn’t experienced class struggle yet.
• Conservation/bourgeois socialism. These socialists realize that the social conditions the Bourgeoisie have created are unstable. They don’t want revolt, so they aim to appease some of the Proletariat’s social grievances and/or convince the Proletariat that all they need are better working conditions, not reform.
• Critical-utopian socialism. Critical-utopian socialists want to improve the lives of everyone, regardless of class. Currently, they support the Proletariat because it’s the most suffering class, but their allegiance is to whichever class is in the worst place, not the Proletariat specifically.

While Communist values don’t align perfectly with those of socialists, they do align with those of working class parties—the Communists support any movement that rebels against the social and political conditions of the day. The only differences between the Communists and working class parties are that the Communists are interested in the Proletariat on a larger scale—most parties are focused on specific countries or incidents, while the Communists are interested in the movement of class struggles as a whole.