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Section
II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class
parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in
America.
The
Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement
of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of
the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.
In France, the Communists ally with the Social Democrats against the conservative
and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical
position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from
the great Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the
fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic
Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution
as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented
the insurrection of Krakow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary
way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty-bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working
class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between
bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway
use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political
conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with
its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes
in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country
is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out
under more advanced conditions of European civilization and with a much
more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth,
and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution
in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian
revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question
in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development
at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic
parties of all countries.
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