Marx and Engels Write the Communist Manifesto Part 4 Eyewitness Report

An excerpt from the Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels about a socialist economic idea.

MARX AND ENGELS WRITE

THE Communist Manifesto

EYEWITNESS REPORT: From the Communist Manifesto: "A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

"Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

"Two things result from this fact:

"I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

"II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself. . . .

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes....

"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.'"

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