Manifesto of the Communist Party

A Communist Confession of Faith

Question 1: Are you a Communist?

Answer: Yes.

Question 2: What is the aim of the Communists?

Answer: To organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop

and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby

infringing the basic conditions of this society.

Question 3: How do you wish to achieve this aim?

Answer: By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community

of property.

Question 4: On what do you base your community of property?

Answer: Firstly, on the mass of productive forces and means of subsistence

resulting from the development of industry, agriculture, trade and colonisation,

and on the possibility inherent in machinery, chemical and other resources of their

infinite extension.

Secondly, on the fact that in the consciousness or feeling of every individual there

exist certain irrefutable basic principles which, being the result of the whole of

historical development, require no proof.

Question 5: What are such principles?

Answer: For example, every individual strives to be happy. The happiness of the

individual is inseparable from the happiness of all, etc.

Question 6: How do you wish to prepare the way for your community of property?

Answer: By enlightening and uniting the proletariat.

Question 7: What is the proletariat?

Answer: The proletariat is that class of society which lives exclusively by its

labour and not on the profit from any kind of capital; that class whose weal and

woe, whose life and death, therefore, depend on the alternation of times of good

and bad business;. in a word, on the fluctuations of competition.

Question 8: Then there have not always been proletarians?

Answer: No. There have always been poor and working classes; and those who

worked were almost always the poor. But there have not always been proletarians,

just as competition has not always been free.

Question 9: How did the proletariat arise?

Answer: The proletariat came into being as a result of the introduction of the

machines which have been invented since the middle of the last century and the

most important of which are: the steam-engine, the spinning machine and the

power loom. These machines, which were very expensive and could therefore

only be purchased by rich people, supplanted the workers of the time, because by

the use of machinery it was possible to produce commodities more quickly and

cheaply than could the workers with their imperfect spinning wheels and hand-