Section
II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing
working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England and the
Agrarian Reformers in America.
The
Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for
the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class;
but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take
care of the future of that movement. In France the Communists
ally themselves with the Social-Democrats, against the conservative
and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take
up a critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally
handed down from the great Revolution.
In
Switzerland they support the Radicals, without losing sight of
the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly
of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical
bourgeois.
In
Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution
as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which
fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.
In
Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a
revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy,
and the petty bourgeoisie.
But
they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working
class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism
between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German
workers may straightaway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie,
the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must
necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that,
after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight
against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The
Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that
country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound
to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation,
and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England
was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century,
and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the
prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
In
short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things.
In
all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question
in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development
at the time.
Finally,
they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic
parties of all countries.
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 Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to
lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
END.
........
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