Finding his views well received by the Central Committee of the Communist League, he acceded to their request to attend their General Congress at London in 1847, and then, after several weeks of keen discussion, he prevailed upon the Congress to adopt "the Manifesto of the Communist party," which was composed by himself and Engels, and which was afterwards translated from the German into English, French, Danish, and Italian, and sown broadcast everywhere just before the Revolution of 1848. This Communist League may be said to be the first organization—and this Communist Manifesto the first public declaration—of the International Socialist Democracy that now is. The Manifesto begins by describing the revolutionary situation into which the course of industrial development has brought modern society. Classes were dying out; the yeomanry, the nobility, the small tradesmen, would soon be no more; and society was drawn up in two widely separated hostile camps, the large capitalist class or bourgeoisie, who had all the property and power in the country, and the labouring class, the proletariat, who had nothing of either. The bourgeoisie had played a most revolutionary part in history. They had overturned feudalism, and now they had created proletarianism, which would soon swamp themselves. They had collected the masses in great towns; they had kept the course of industry in perpetual flux and insecurity by rapid successive transformations of the instruments and processes of production, and by continual recurrences of commercial crises; and while they had reduced all other classes to a proletariat, they had made the life of the proletariat one of privation, of uncertainty, of discontent, of incipient revolution. They exploited the labourer of political power; they exploited him of property, for they treated him as a ware, buying him in the cheapest market for the cost of his production, that is to say, the cost of his living, and taking from him the whole surplus of his work, after deducting the value of his subsistence. Under the system of wage labour, it could not be otherwise. Wages could never, by economic laws, rise above subsistence. While wage labour created property, it created it always for the capitalist, and never for the labourer; and, in fact, the latter only lived at all, so far as it was for the interests of the governing class, the bourgeoisie, to permit him. Class rule and wage labour must be swept away, for they were radically unjust, and a new reign must be inaugurated which would be politically democratic and socially communistic, and in which the free development of each should be the condition for the free development of all.
The Manifesto went on to say that communism was not the subversion of existing principles, but their universalization. Communism did not seek to abolish the State, but only the bourgeois State, in which the bourgeois exclusively hold and wield political power. Communism did not seek to abolish property, but only the bourgeois system of property, under which private property is really already abolished for nine-tenths of society, and maintained merely for one-tenth. Communism did not seek to abolish marriage and the family, but only the bourgeois system of things under which marriage and the family, in any true sense of those terms, were virtually class institutions, for the proletariat could not have any family life worthy of the name, so long as their wages were so low that they were forced to huddle up their whole family regardless of all decency, in a single room, so long as their wives and daughters were victims of the seduction of the bourgeoisie, and so long as their children were taken away prematurely to labour in mills for bourgeois manufacturers, who yet held up their hands in horror at the thought of any violation of the institution of the family. Communism did not tend to abolish fatherland and nationality—that was abolished already for the proletariat, and was being abolished for the bourgeoisie, too, by the extensions of their trade.
As to the way of emancipation, the proletariat must strive to obtain political power, and use it to deprive the bourgeoisie of all capital and means of production, and to place them in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat itself organized as a governing body. Now, for this, immediate and various measures interfering with property, and condemned by our current economics, were requisite. Those measures would naturally be different for different countries, but for the most advanced countries the following were demanded: (1) Expropriation of landed property and application of rent to State expenditure; (2) abolition of inheritance; (3) confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels; (4) centralization of credit in the hands of the State by means of a national bank, with State capital and exclusive monopoly; (5) centralization of all means of transport in hands of State; (6) institution of national factories, and improvement of lands on a common plan; (7) compulsory obligation of labour upon all equally, and establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture; (8) joint prosecution of agriculture and mechanical arts, and gradual abolition of the distinction of town and country; (9) public and gratuitous education for all children, abolition of children's labour in factories, etc. The Manifesto ends by saying:—"The communists do not seek to conceal their views and aims. They declare openly that their purpose can only be obtained by a violent overthrow of all existing arrangements of society. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose in it but their chains; they have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"
When the French Revolution of February, 1848, broke out, Marx was expelled without circumstance from Brussels, and received an invitation from the Provisional Government of Paris to return to France. He accepted this invitation, but was only a few weeks in Paris when the German revolution of March occurred, and he hastened to the theatre of affairs. With his friends, Freiligrath, Wolff, Engels, and others, he established on June 1st in Cologne the New Rhenish Gazette, which was the soul of the Rhenish revolutionary movement, the most important one of the year in Germany, and that in which, as we have seen, the young Lassalle first emerged on the troubled surface of revolutionary politics. After the coup d'état of November, dissolving the Prussian Parliament, the New Rhenish Gazette strongly urged the people to stop paying their taxes, and thus meet force by force. It inserted an admonition to that effect in a prominent place in every successive number, and Marx was twice tried for sedition on account of this admonition, but each time acquitted. The newspaper, however, was finally suppressed by civil authority after the Dresden insurrection of May, 1849, its last number appearing on June 19th in red type, and containing Freiligrath's well-known "Farewell of the New Rhenish Gazette"—spiritedly translated for us by Ernest Jones—which declared that the journal went down with "rebellion" on its lips, but would reappear when the last of the German Crowns was overturned.
Farewell, but not for ever farewell!
They cannot kill the spirit, my brother;
In thunder I'll rise on the field where I fell,
More boldly to fight out another.
When the last of Crowns, like glass, shall break
On the scene our sorrows have haunted,