corpus01.txt

BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS.(a)

The history of all hitherto existing society(b) is the history of class
struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guildmaster(c) 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 classes.

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
classes, again, subordinate gradations.

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 bourgeois, 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.

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

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh
ground for the rising bourgeoisie.  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
class; 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
class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial
armies, the modern bourgeois.

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 bourgeoisie developed, increased its
capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from
the middle ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie 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 bourgeoisie was accompanied by a
corresponding political advance of that class.  An oppressed class
under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing
association in the medieval commune(d), 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, corner-stone of the
great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie 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 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, 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 bourgeoisie 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 bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and
has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie 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 bourgeoisie 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 classes.  Constant
revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the
bourgeois 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
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.  It must nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie 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 inter-dependence 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 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 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 bourgeois mode of production; it
compels them to introduce what it calls civilization 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 civilized 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 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 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.  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 bourgeoisie 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 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.  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 bourgeoisie 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
bourgeois 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 bourgeois 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 bourgeois society, endanger the existence of
bourgeois property.  The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow
to comprise the wealth created by them.  And how does the bourgeoisie
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 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 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 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.  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 bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and
hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-seer, 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 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 working
class.  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 bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper,
the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class--the small trades-people,
shopkeepers, and 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 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 laborers, 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 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
bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is
compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet,
for a time, able to do so.  At this stage, therefore, the proletarians
do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the
remnants of absolute monarchy, and land owners, the non-industrial
bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie.  Thus the whole historical movement
is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so
obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

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 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 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 workman 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
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 classes.  But every class 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
proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organization 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.  Thus the ten-hours' bill in
England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further,
in many ways, the course of the 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 countries 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 weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

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

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 old 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.  Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the
nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the
bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion
of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level
of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie to-day,
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.  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 proletariat; they thus defend not their
present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint
to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting class
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 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 bourgeois prejudices,
behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

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

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in
the interest of minorities.  The proletarian movement is the
self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the
interest of the immense majority.  The proletariat, the lowest stratum
of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without
the whole super-incumbent 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.

Hitherto every form of society has been based, as we have already seen,
on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.  But in order to
oppress a class 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 bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to
develop into a bourgeois.  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 class.  He becomes a pauper, and
pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.  And here
it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the
ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon
society as an over-riding 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 bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer
compatible with society.

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-labor.  Wage-labor rests exclusively on
competition between the laborers.  The advance of industry, whose
involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, 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 bourgeoisie
produces and appropriates products.  What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave diggers.  Its fall and the
victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.



(a) By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of
the means of social production and employers of wage-labor.  By
proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of
production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in
order to live.

(b) That is, all written history.  In 1847, the pre-history of society,
the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all
but unknown.  Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of
land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which
all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village
communities were found to be, or to have been the primitive form of
society everywhere from India to Ireland.  The inner organization of
this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form,
by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true nature of the Gens and its
relation to the Tribe.  With the dissolution of these primaeval
communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and
finally antagonistic classes.  I have attempted to retrace this process
of dissolution in: "Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und
des Staats," 2nd edit., Stuttgart, 1886.

(c) Guildmaster, that is a full member of a guild, a master within, not
a head of a guild.

(d) "Commune" was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even
before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters, local
self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate."  Generally
speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is
here taken as the typical country; for its political development,
France.