Quotes from The Communist Manifesto

Quotations follow the Samuel Moore translation (Penguin Classics, 2002) — our recommended edition.

1. 2

   Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

2. 3

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

3. 4

   The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

4. 5

   Working Men of All Countries, Unite!

5. 6

   All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

6. 7

   What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.

7. 8

   In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

8. 9

   Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

9. 10

   The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

10. 11

    It has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'.

11. 12

    It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

12. 13

    In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

13. 14

    It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

14. 15

    Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

15. 16

    The working men have no country.

16. 17

    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.

17. 18

    But every class struggle is a political struggle.