Karl Marx - The Communist Manifesto (1848)

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A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.

Karl Marx
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Karl Marx
The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be obtained only by 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!

Karl Marx
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.

Karl Marx
The first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.

Karl Marx
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the race of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

Karl Marx
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

Karl Marx
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

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

Karl Marx
In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

Karl Marx
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

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

Karl Marx
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has, historically, played a most revolutionary role.

Karl Marx
There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom,, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.

Karl Marx
The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Karl Marx