Kemopetrol squad - the communist manifesto
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POSITION OF
THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE
VARIOUS EXISTING
OPPOSITION PARTIES
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 with the Social Democrats * against the conservative
and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical
position in regard to phases 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 Krakow 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 instill into the working class the clearest possible recognition of
the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that
the German workers may straightway 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
civilization and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England
was in the seventeenth, and 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 labor 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 communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing
to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working men of all countries, unite!
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