Based on what you have learned in this course, you will write an 8-page paper comparing and contrasting ideas of the just society as expressed in:
-The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
–The Communist Manifesto
-The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Approved by the National Assembly of France, August 26, 1789
The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing
that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public
calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a
solemn
declaration the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this
declaration, being constantly before all the members of the Social body, shall remind
them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power,
as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the
objects and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected, and,
lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and
incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound
to
the happiness of all. Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the
presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and
of the citizen:
Articles:
1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded
only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and
imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance
to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor
individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the
exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to
the
other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be
determined by law.
5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be
prevented
which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for
by law.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate
personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all,
whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are
equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to
their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and
according
to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to
be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or
arrested
in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.
8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously
necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a
law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.
9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest
shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the
prisoner’s
person shall be severely repressed by law.
10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views,
provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the
rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but
shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces.
These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal
advantage of those to whom they shall be intrusted.
13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for
the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in
proportion to their means.
14. All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives,
as
to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is
put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration
of the taxes.
15. Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his
administration.
16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of
powers defined, has no constitution at all.
17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof
except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only
on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.
—The above document was written by The Marquis de Lafayette, with help from his friend
and neighbor, American envoy to France, Thomas Jefferson. There are also versions
credited to Alexis Francois Pison de Galland, a member of the National Assembly who
approved the Declaration.
MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
[Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1847]
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.
All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to
exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its
opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding
reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as
against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish
their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of
Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself….
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman,
in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another,
carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended,
either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the
contending classes….
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not
done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions
of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of
the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class
antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile
camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat….
Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America
paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to
navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the
extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways
extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and
pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages….
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding
political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility
… the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the
world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive
political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal,
patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that
bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between
man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the
most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth
into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word,
for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct,
brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked
up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet,
the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the
family relation to a mere money relation….
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of
society. …
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over
the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan
character to production and consumption in every country. …. All old-established
national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are
dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for
all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but
raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed,
not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by
the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the
products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and
self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of
nations. ….
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 civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with
which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely
obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction,
to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls
civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates
a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created
enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural,
and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and
semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on
nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the
population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production,
and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was
political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate
interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one
nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier
and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years,
has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together. …
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the
bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage … the
feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed
productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they
were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political
constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois
class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. 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. … It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put
on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society.
In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously
created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out
an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic
of over-production. … And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one
hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest
of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say,
by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing
the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned
against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has
also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern
working class—the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the
proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so
long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.
These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every
other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of
competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the
workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple,
most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. …
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the
great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory,
are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the
command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of
the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by
the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois
manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and
aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the
more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded
by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social
validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to
use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that
he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the
bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired
tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into
the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on
which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large
capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new
methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the
population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its
struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers,
then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality,
against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not
against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of
production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they
smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the
vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole
country, and broken up by their mutual competition. …
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it
becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength
more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are
more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of
labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing
competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages
of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever
more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the
collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the
character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form
combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep
up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision
beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into
riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their
battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers.
…
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party,
is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.
But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of
particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the
bourgeoisie itself. …
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the
course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a
constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the
bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of
industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees
itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into
the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own
instruments of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat
with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie….
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of
dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society,
assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts
itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its
hands….
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 face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The
lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all
these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions
of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. …
The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the
lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a
proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a
bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually
swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has
no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial
labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in
Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion,
are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many
bourgeois interests.
… The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except
by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other
previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify;
their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual
property.
… The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the
immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest
stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole
superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie
is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all
settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced
the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that
war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie
lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat….
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the
formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wagelabour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry,
whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers,
due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The
development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation
on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie,
therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.
II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould
the proletarian movement….
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian
parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy,
conquest of political power by the proletariat….
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change
consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois
property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but
the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final
and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products,
that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence:
Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of
personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is
alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty
artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form?
There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent
already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital,
i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except
upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property,
in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us
examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production.
Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in
the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in
motion.
Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all
members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It
is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means
of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in bare existence as a labourer. What,
therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to
prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this
personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the
maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to
command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable
character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital,
and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In
Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote
the existence of the labourer….
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of
individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality,
bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade,
free selling and buying….
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing
society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its
existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.
You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the
necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the
immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so;
that is just what we intend….
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all
that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of
such appropriation.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and
universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through
sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who
acquire anything, do not work. …
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating
material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes
of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the
disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the
disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training
to act as a machine….
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the
Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on
private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the
bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the
family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution….
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To
this crime we plead guilty….
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation
of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern
Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children
transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour….
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and
nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.
…
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the
exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the
antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to
another will come to an end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and,
generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions,
in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his
material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?…
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted
in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at
different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the
exploitation of one part of society by the other. …
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations;
no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise
the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the
bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of
the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive
forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic
inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by
means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable,
but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further
inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely
revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will of course be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally
applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with
State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing
into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance
with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the
distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population
over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour
in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all
production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole
nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so
called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the
proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of
circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself
the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production,
then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the
existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have
abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall
have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all….
…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!
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Preamble
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable
rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice
and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous
acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world
in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom
from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common
people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last
resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be
protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between
nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their
faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person
and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote
social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation
with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of
human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the
greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, therefore,
The General Assembly,
Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of
achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and
every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by
teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by
progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and
effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States
themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article I
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are
endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a
spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration,
without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion,
political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political,
jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person
belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other
limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be
prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
or punishment.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal
protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any
discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such
discrimination.
Article 8
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals
for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent
and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any
criminal charge against him.
Article 11
1. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed
innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he
has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
2. No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or
omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or
international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier
penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal
offence was committed.
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home
or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has
the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the
borders of each State.
2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to
return to his country.
Article 14
1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from
persecution.
2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely
arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and
principles of the United Nations.
Article 15
1. Everyone has the right to a nationality.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to
change his nationality.
Article 16
1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality
or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled
to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the
intending spouses.
3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is
entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17
1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with
others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right
includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in
community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in
teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes
freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21
1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country,
directly or through freely chosen representatives.
2. Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country.
3. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government;
this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall
be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by
equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled
to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in
accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic,
social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development
of his personality.
Article 23
1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and
favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal
work.
3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration
ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity,
and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of
his interests.
Article 24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of
working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25
1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and
well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing
and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security
in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or
other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All
children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social
protection.
Article 26
1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the
elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be
compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made
generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all
on the basis of merit.
2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human
personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and
fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and
friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further
the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be
given to their children.
Article 27
1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the
community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and
its benefits.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests
resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the
author.
Article 28
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and
freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29
1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full
development of his personality is possible.
2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only
to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of
securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others
and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the
general welfare in a democratic society.
3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the
purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or
person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the
destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.