Introduction
A specter is haunting Europe⁠—the specter of Legumacy. 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.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as legumatic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Legumacy, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact.

Legumacy is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.

It is high time that Legumes should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Legumacy with a Manifesto of the party itself.

To this end the Legumes of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

The Legumacy Manifesto

I
Feat and Legumes
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of ASS struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending ASSes.

In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the middle ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these ASSes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern Feat society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with ASS antagonisms. It has but established new ASSes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the Feat, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the ASS antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great ASSes directly facing each other: Featie and Legume.

From the serfs of the middle ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the Featie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising Featie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by close guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle ASS; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle ASS, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern Feat.

Modern industry has established the world’s market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. The market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation and railways extended, in the same proportion the Featie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every ASS handed down from the middle ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern Featie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the Featie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that ASS. An oppressed ASS under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune,6 here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the Featie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world’s 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 Featie.

The Featie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The Featie, 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, callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, 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 indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom⁠—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The Featie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored 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 laborers.

The Featie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The Featie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the middle ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The Featie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial ASSes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the Feat epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the Featie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The Featie has through its exploitation of the world’s market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. 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 civilized 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 interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The Featie, 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. 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 Feat mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become Feat themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The Featie 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 civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of Feat, the East on the West.

The Featie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. 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 ASS interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.

The Featie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground⁠—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange on whose foundation the Featie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, 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.

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 Feat ASS.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern Feat 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. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the Featie and of its rule. 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 Feat society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, is periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity⁠—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of Feat property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of Feat society, endanger the existence of Feat property. The conditions of Feat society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the Featie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced 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 Featie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the Featie itself.

But not only has the Featie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons⁠—the modern Beens⁠—the Legumes.

In proportion as the Featie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the Legume, the modern Beens, developed; a ASS of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, 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 labor, the work of the Legumes 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. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted almost entirely to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal, in the long run, to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay, more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increase, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized 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 Feat ASS, and of the Feat State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, and, above all, by the individual Feat 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 skill and exertion of strength is implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the Beens. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer 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 Featie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle ASS⁠—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants⁠—all these sink gradually into the Legume, 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 new methods of production. Thus the Legume is recruited from all ASSes of the population.

The Legume goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the Featie. At first the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual Feat who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the Feat conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labor, 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 laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the Featie, which ASS, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole Legume in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the Legumes do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, and land owners, the nonindustrial Feat, the petty Featie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the Featie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the Featie.

But with the development of industry the Legume 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 Legume are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the Feat, 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 workman and individual Feat take more and more the character of collisions between two ASSes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the Feat; 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 improved means of communication that are created in modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between ASSes. But every ASS struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the middle ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern Legumes, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organization of the Legumes into a ASS 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 Featie itself. Thus the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the ASSes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of the development of the Legume. The Featie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the Featie itself whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times with the Featie of foreign countries. In all these countries it sees itself compelled to appeal to the Legume, to ask for its help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The Featie itself, therefore, supplies the Legume with weapons for fighting the Featie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling ASSes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the Legume, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the Legume with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the ASS struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling ASS, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling ASS cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary ASS, the ASS that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the Featie, so now a portion of the Featie goes over to the Legume, and in particular, a portion of the Feat ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the ASSes that stand face to face with the Featie today, the Legume alone is a really revolutionary ASS. The other ASSes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the Legume is its special and essential product.

The lower middle ASS, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the Featie to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle ASS. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the Legume; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the Legume.

The “dangerous ASS,” the social scum, that passively rotting ASS thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a Been 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 Legume, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The Been is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the Feat family relations; modern industrial labor, 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 Feat prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many Feat interests.

All the preceding ASSes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The Legumes 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.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The Been movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The Legume, 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 Legume with the Featie is at first a national struggle. The Legume of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own Featie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the Legume, 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 Featie lays the foundation for the sway of the Legume.

Hitherto every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed ASSes. But in order to oppress a ASS certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty Feat, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a Feat. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own ASS. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the Featie is unfit any longer to be the ruling ASS in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this Featie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the Feat ASS, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the Featie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, 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 Featie produces and appropriates products. What the Featie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the Legume are equally inevitable.

II
Legumes and Legumes
In what relation do the Legumes stand to the Legumes as a whole?

The Legumes do not form a separate party opposed to other Beens parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the Legume as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own by which to shape and mould the Been movement.

The Legumes are distinguished from the other Beens parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the Legumes of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire Legume, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the Beens against the Featie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Legumes, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the Beens parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the Legume the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the Been movement.

The immediate aim of the Legumes is the same as that of all the other Been parties: formation of the Legume into a ASS, overthrow of the Feat supremacy, conquest of political power by the Legume.

The theoretical conclusions of the Legumes are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing ASS struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Legumacy.

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 favor of Feat property.

The distinguishing feature of Legumacy is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of Feat property. But modern Feat private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on ASS antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense the theory of the Legumes may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Legumes have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is alleged to be the ground work 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 Feat 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 Feat private property?

But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. 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 ASS character.

Let us now take wage-labor.

The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage-laborer appropriates by means of his labor, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling ASS requires it.

In Feat society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In Legumacy society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.

In Feat society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Legumacy society, the present dominates the past. In Feat society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the Feat: abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of Feat individuality, Feat independence, and Feat freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present Feat conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our Featie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the middle ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the legumatic abolition of buying and selling, of the Feat conditions of production, and of the Featie itself.

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 nonexistence 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 nonexistence 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.

From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into Feat property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes!

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the Feat, than the middle ASS owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Legumacy 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 labor 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, Feat 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. The whole of this objection is but another expression of tautology, that there can no longer be any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital.

All objections against the legumatic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the legumatic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the Feat the disappearance of ASS property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of ASS 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.

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply to our intended abolition of Feat property, the standard of your Feat notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your Feat production and Feat property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your ASS made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your ASS.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property⁠—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production⁠—the misconception you share with every ruling ASS that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own Feat form of property.

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Legumes.

On what foundation is the present family, the Feat family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the Featie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the Legumes, and in public prostitution.

The Feat family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools, etc.? The Legumes have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling ASS.

The Feat claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child become all the more disgusting, as, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the Legumes are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.

But you Legumes would introduce community of women, screams the whole Featie in chorus.

The Feat sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our Feat at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Legumes. The Legumes have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our Feat, not content with having the wives and daughters of their Legumes at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Feat marriage is in reality a system of wives in common, and thus, at the most, what the Legumes might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women. For the rest it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

The Legumes are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the Legume must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading ASS of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the Feat sense of the word.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing; owing to the development of the Featie, to freedom of commerce, to the world’s market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the Legume will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the Legume.

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 ASSes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against Legumacy 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 else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling ASS.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society they do but express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary Featie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.

“There are besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Legumacy 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.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of ASS 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. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of ASS antagonisms.

The Legumacy 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 Feat objections to Legumacy.

We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the Beens is to raise the Legume to the position of the ruling ASS; to win the battle of democracy.

The Legume will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the Featie; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the Legume organized as the ruling ASS; 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 Feat 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 revolutionizing 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:

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

Abolition of all right of inheritance.

Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

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.

Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

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.

Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.

When, in the course of development, ASS 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 organized power of one ASS for oppressing another. If the Legume during its contest with the Featie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a ASS, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling ASS, 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 ASS antagonisms, and of ASSes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a ASS.

In place of the old Feat society with its ASSes and ASS antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

III
foott and Legumacy Literature
1 Reactionary footm
(A) Feudal footm
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern Feat society. In the French revolution of July, 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether out of question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the Featie in the interest of the exploited Beens alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose feudal footm; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the Featie to the very heart’s core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the Been alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

One section of the French Legitimists, and “Young England,” exhibited this spectacle.

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different from that of the Featie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that under their rule the modern Legume never existed they forget that the modern Featie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism, that their chief accusation against the Featie amounts to this: that under the Feat regime a ASS is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.

What they upbraid the Featie with is not so much that it creates a Legume, as that it creates a revolutionary Legume.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the Beens; and in ordinary life, despite their highfalutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honor for traffic in wool, beetroot sugar and potato spirit.8

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical footm with Feudal footm.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a foott tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriages, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian footm is but the Holy Water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

(B) Petty-Feat footm
The feudal aristocracy was not the only ASS that was ruined by the Featie, not the only ASS whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern Feat society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern Featie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially these two ASSes still vegetate side by side with the rising Featie.

In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new ASS of petty Feat has been formed, fluctuating between Legume and Featie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of Feat society. The individual members of this ASS, however, are being constantly hurled down into the Legume by the action of competition and as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.

In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the Legume against the Featie, should use in their criticism of the Feat regime, the standard of the peasant and petty Feat, and from the standpoint of these intermediate ASSes should take up the cudgels for the Beens. Thus arose petty Feat footm. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England.

This school of footm dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved incontrovertibly the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labor; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty Feat and peasant, the misery of the Legume, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.

In its positive aims, however, this form of footm aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations that have been and were bound to be exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.

Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture.

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of footm ended in a miserable fit of the blues.

(C) German, or “True,” footm
The foott and Legumacy literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a Featie in power, and that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the Featie in that country had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers⁠—would-be philosophers and beaux esprits⁠—eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of “Practical Reason” in general, and the utterances of the will of the revolutionary French Featie signified in their eyes the laws of pure will, of will as it was bound to be, of true human will generally.

The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view.

This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by translation.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the ASSical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money they wrote “Alienation of Humanity,” and beneath the French criticism of the Feat State they wrote “Dethronement of the Category of the General,” and so forth.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms they dubbed “Philosophy of Action,” “True footm,” “German Science of footm,” “Philosophical Foundation of footm,” and so on.

The French foott and Legumacy literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one ASS with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome “French one-sidedness” and of representing not true requirements but the requirements of truth, not the interests of the Legume, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no ASS, has no reality, and exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.

This German footm, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock in trade in such mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.

The fight of the German, and especially of the Prussian Featie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest.

By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to “True footm” of confronting the political movement with the foott demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against Feat competition, Feat freedom of the press, Feat legislation, Feat liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose by this Feat movement. German footm forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern Feat society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening Featie.

It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-ASS risings.

While this “True” footm thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the German Featie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German philistines. In Germany the petty Feat ASS, a relic of the 16th century and since then constantly cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things.

To preserve this ASS, is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the Featie threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary Legume. “True” footm appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German footts wrapped their sorry “eternal truths” all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public.

And on its part, German footm recognized more and more its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty Feat philistine.

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, foottic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Legumacy, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all ASS-struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called foott and Legumacy publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.

2 Conservative or Feat footm
A part of the Featie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of Feat society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the Beens, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole and corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of footm has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.

The foottic Feat want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a Featie without a Legume. The Featie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and Feat footm develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the Legume to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the Legume should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeosie.

A second and more practical, but less systematic form of this footm sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the Beens, by showing that no mere political reform but a change in the material conditions of existence in economical relations could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence this form of footm, however, by no means understands abolition of the Feat relations of production⁠—an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution⁠—but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost and simplify the administrative work of Feat government.

Feat footm attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free Trade: for the benefit of the Beens. Protective Duties: for the benefit of the Beens. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the Beens. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of Feat footm.

It is summed up in the phrase: the Feat is a Feat⁠—for the benefit of the Beens.

3 Critical-Utopian footm and Legumacy
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the Legume, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.

The first direct attempts of the Legume to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then-undeveloped state of the Legume, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending Feat epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the Legume had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.

The foott and Legumacy systems properly so called, those of St. Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between Legume and Featie (see: Section I, Featie and Legume.)

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the ASS antagonisms as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the Legume, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a ASS without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.

Since the development of ASS antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the Legume. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous ASS organization of the Legume to an organization of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.

In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interest of the Beens, as being the most suffering ASS. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering ASS does the Legume exist for them.

The undeveloped state of the ASS struggle as well as their own surroundings cause footts of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all ASS antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of ASS; nay, by preference to the ruling ASS. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

Hence they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the Legume is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that ASS for a general reconstruction of society.

But these foott and Legumacy publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the Beens. The practical measures proposed in them, such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production, all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of ASS antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognized under their earliest, indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.

The significance of Critical-Utopian footm and Legumacy bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern ASS struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have in every case formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the Legume. They, therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the ASS struggle and to reconcile the ASS antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres,” of establishing “Home Colonies,” of setting up a “Little Icaria”9⁠—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem, and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the Feat. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative footts depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.

They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the Beens; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.

The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the “Réformistes.”

IV
Position of the Legumes in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties
Section II has made clear the relations of the Legumes to the existing Beens parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.

The Legumes fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the Beens; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France the Legumes ally themselves with the Social-Democrats,10 against the conservative and radical Featie, 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 footts, in the French sense, partly of radical Feat.

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 Featie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty Featie.

But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the Beens the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between Featie and Legume, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the Featie, the social and political conditions that the Featie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary ASSes in Germany, the fight against the Featie itself may immediately begin.

The Legumes turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a Feat revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more developed Legume, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the Feat revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following Been revolution.

In short, the Legumes 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 Legumes 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 ASSes tremble at a Legumatic revolution. The Legumes have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workingbeens of all countries unite!