Question 1 : What is Communism?
Answer : Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.
Question 2 : What is the proletariat?
Answer : The proletariat is that class in society which draws its means of livelihood wholly and solely from the sale of its labour and not from the profit from any kind of capital;[
2] whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose whole existence depends on the demand for labour, hence, on the alternations of good times and bad in business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the nineteenth century.
Question 3 : Proletarians, then, have not always existed?
Answer : No. Poor folk and working classes have always existed, and the working classes have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under the conditions just stated; in other words, there have not always been proletarians any more than there has always been free and unbridled competition.
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Question 5 : Under what conditions does this sale of the labour of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place?
Answer: Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor.
But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.
However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the industrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than his minimum.
This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big industry has taken possession of all branches of production.
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Question 7 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave?
Answer : The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, the property of a
single master, is already assured an existence, however wretched it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, the property, as it were, of the whole bourgeois
class, which buys his labour only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the proletarian
class as a whole. The slave is outside competition, the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries. The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of civil society; the proletarian is recognized as a person, as a member of civil society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, but the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and himself stands on a higher level than the slave. The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian himself; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
Question 8 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf?
Answer : The serf enjoys the possession and use of an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he hands over a part of his product or performs labour. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf frees himself either by running away to the town and there becoming a handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money instead of labour and products, thereby becoming a free tenant; or by driving his feudal lord away and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering in one way or another into the owning class and into competition. The proletarian frees himself by abolishing competition, private property and all class differences.
