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\begin{document}

\title{Karl Marx on labour and class dynamics}



\author[1]{Raph Mondesir}%
\affil[1]{Affiliation not available}%


\vspace{-1em}



  
  \date{May 25, 2024}


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\begin{abstract}
Karl Marx, along with Emile Durkheim and Max~Weber, is considered one of
the main foundational theorists of social science.~His contributions~to
sociology and the development of the conflict paradigm are undeniable.
Through his writings~with Friedrich~Engels, Marx sparked some of the
most controversial debates about class dynamics, the meaning of money
and work, where capital comes from and the very nature of human beings
as productive entities.~Most famously, his critique of the capitalist
system and his proposal of an alternative political economy often
endorses the tone of not just a theorist but also an activist for the
labriojng masses all over the world.~%
\end{abstract}%



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\section*{-----------------------------------------------------------------}

{\label{885081}}

\subsection*{THE STRUGGLE FOR THE NORMAL WORKING-DAY. RE-ACTION OF THE
ENGLISH ACTS ON OTHER
COUNTRIES.}\label{the-struggle-for-the-normal-working-day.-re-action-of-the-english-acts-on-other-countries.}

The reader will bear in mind that the production of surplus-value, or
the extraction of, is the specific end and aim, the sum and substance,
of capitalist production quite apart from any changes in the mode of
production, which may arise from the subordination of~ to capital. He
will remember that as far as we have at present gone, only the
independent~, and therefore only the~ legally qualified to act for
himself, enters as a vendor of a commodity into a contract with the
capitalist. If, therefore, in our historical sketch, on the one hand,
modern industry; on the other, the~ of those who are physically and
legally minors, play important parts, the former was to us only a
special department, and the latter only a specially striking example of~
exploitation. Without, however, anticipating the subsequent development
of our inquiry, from the mere~ of the historic facts before us, it
follows:[?]

First. The passion of capital for an unlimited and reckless extension of
the working day, is first gratified in the industries earliest {} by
water-power, steam, and machinery, in those first creations of the
modern mode of production, cotton, wool, flax, and silk spinning, and
weaving. The changes in the material mode of production, and the
corresponding changes in the social relations of the producers151{}gave
rise first to an extravagance beyond all bounds, and then in opposition
to this, called forth a control on the part of Society which legally
limits, regulates, and makes uniform the working day and its pauses.
This control appears, therefore, during the first half of the nineteenth
century simply as exceptional legislation.152{}As soon as this primitive
dominion of {[}327{]}{}the new mode of production was conquered, it was
found that, in the meantime, not only had many other branches of
production been made to adopt the same factory system, but that
manufacturers with more or less obsolete methods, such as potteries,
glass-making, 8c., that old-fashioned handicrafts, like baking, and,
finally, even that the so-called domestic industries such as
nail-making,153{}had long since fallen as completely under capitalist
exploitation as the factories themselves. Legislation was, therefore,
compelled to gradually get rid of its exceptional character, or where,
as in England, it proceeds after the manner of the Roman Casuists, to
declare any house in which work was done to be a factory.154

Second. The history of the regulation of the working day in certain
branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others in
regard to this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated {}, the
{} as \&quot;free\&quot; vendor of his {}, when capitalist production
has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of
resistance. The creation of a normal working day is, therefore, the
product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the
capitalist class and the working class. As the contest takes place in
the arena of modern industry, it first breaks out in the home of that
industry---England.155{}The English factory workers were the champions,
not only of the English, but of the modern working-class generally, as
their theorists were the first to throw down the gauntlet to the theory
of capital.156 {[}328{]}{}Hence, the philosopher of the Factory, {},
denounces as an ineffable disgrace to the English working-class that
they inscribed \&quot;the slavery of the Factory Acts\&quot; on the
banner which they bore against capital, manfully striving for
\&quot;perfect freedom of {}.\&quot;

France limps slowly behind England. The February revolution was
necessary to bring into the world the 12 hours' law,158{}which is much
more deficient than its English original. For all that, the French
revolutionary method has its special advantages. It once for all
commands the same limit to the working-day in all shops and factories
without distinction, whilst English legislation reluctantly yields to
the pressure of circumstances, now on this point, now on that, and is
getting lost in a hopelessly bewildering tangle of contradictory
enactments.159{}On the other hand, the French law proclaims as a
principle that which in England was only won in the name of children,
minors, and women, and has been only recently for the first time claimed
as a general right.

In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the
workers was {} so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. {}
cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is
branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The
first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours' agitation, that ran
with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, from New England to California. The General Congress of Labour
at Baltimore (August 16th, 1866) declared: \&quot;The first and great
necessity of the present, to free the {} of this country from
capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall
be the normal working-day in all States of the American Union. We are
resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is
attained.\&quot;161{}At the same time, the Congress of the International
Working Men's Association at Geneva, on the proposition of the London
General Council, resolved that \&quot;the limitation of the working-day
is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at
improvement and emancipation must prove abortive\ldots{}the Congress
proposes eight hours as the legal limit of the working-day.\&quot;

{} the movement of the working-class on both sides of the Atlantic, that
had grown instinctively out of the conditions of production themselves,
endorsed the words of the English Factory Inspector, R. J. Saunders:
\&quot;Further steps towards a reformation of society can never be
carried out with any hope of success, unless the hours of {} be limited,
and the prescribed limit strictly enforced.\&quot;162

It must be acknowledged that our {} comes out of the {[}330{]}{}process
of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of
the commodity \&quot;{}\&quot; face to face with other owners of
commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the
capitalist his {} proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed
of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was
no \&quot;free agent,\&quot; that the time for which he is free to sell
his {} is the time for which he is forced to sell it,163{}that in fact
the vampire will not lose its hold on him \&quot;so long as there is a
muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.\&quot;164{}For
\&quot;protection\&quot; against \&quot;the serpent of their
agonies,\&quot; the {} must put their heads together, and, as a class,
compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall
prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with
capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death.165{}In
place of the pompous {} of the \&quot;inalienable rights of man\&quot;
comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which
shall make clear \&quot;when the time which the worker sells is ended,
and when his own begins.\&quot;166Quantum {} ab {}!

--------------------------------

\subsection*{BOURGEOIS AND
PROLETARIANS}\label{bourgeois-and-proletarians}

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

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master(3){}and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,
stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended,
either in a revolutionary 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 bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this
distinct feature: it has simplified 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 {} 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 {} 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, in which industrial production was {} by
closed 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 {}
between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division
of {} in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery {}
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 the whole industrial armies, the modern
bourgeois.

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

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(4): here independent urban republic (as in Italy
and Germany); there taxable ``third estate'' of the monarchy (as in
France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing 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 bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of
Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the
modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of
the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of
the whole bourgeoisie.

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

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to
all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn
asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ``natural
superiors'', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man
than naked self-interest, than callous ``cash payment''. It has drowned
the most heavenly ecstasies of religious {}, 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 {}
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 {}.

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 {} in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries 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 {} 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 form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant {} 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 entire surface of the globe. It must nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, establish {} everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
To the great chagrin of {}, 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 {} 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
production 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 {} and
narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous
national and local {}, 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 {}. The cheap prices of
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 {} 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 {} 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, {} the means of production, and has
concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this
was political {}. 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, {} 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 {}?

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 {} 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; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted in it, and the economic 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 bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention
the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence
of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more
threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing
products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are
periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic
that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity --- the
epidemic of over-production. 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 {}, 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 {}, who live only so long as they find work, and who find
work only so long as their {} increases capital. These {}, 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 the division of {}, 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 maintenance, and for the propagation of
his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of {}, is
equal 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 {} increases, in the
same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by
prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted
in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal
master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of
{}, crowded into the factory, are {} 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 {}, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois
manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to
be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more
embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual {}, in
other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the
{} 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 {}, more or less expensive to use, according to their age
and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the {} by the manufacturer, so far, at
an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the
other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the
pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class --- the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the {} 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 {} skill is rendered worthless by new
methods of production. {} 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 {}, then by the {} of a factory, then by the
operative 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 {}, they smash to {} 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 {} 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, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty
bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is {} 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
{}, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of {}, 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 increasing
improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their
livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual
workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of
collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form
combinations (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together
in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations
in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here
and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real
fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the
ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the
improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and
that place the workers of different localities in contact with one
another. It was just this contact that was needed to {} 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 proletarian, thanks
to railways, achieve in a few years.

This {} 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 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 time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these
battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask
for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie
itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of
political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the
proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class
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
progress 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 today,
the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes
decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the
proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the
artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save
from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They
are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are
reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by
chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so 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 mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the 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 condition 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 industry {}, 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 {} 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 the feudal absolutism, managed to
develop into a bourgeois. The modern {}, on the contrary, instead of
rising with the process 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 conditions for the existence and for the sway of the
bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the
condition for capital is {}. {} rests exclusively on competition between
the {}. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the {}, due to competition, by
the 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.

{}

\section*{Notes~}

{\label{687807}}

1. By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of
the means of social production and employers of wage~{}.

By proletariat, the class of modern wage~{}who, having no means of
production of their own, are reduced to selling their~{}power in order
to live. {[}Engels, 1888 English edition{]}

2. In 1847, the~{}of society, the social~{}existing previous to recorded
history, all but unknown. Since then, August~{}(1792-1866) discovered
common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig~{}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~{}of this primitive communistic society was laid
bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1881) crowning
discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe.
With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be
differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have
attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886.
{[}Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last
sentence omitted){]}

3. Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not
a head of a guild. {[}Engels, 1888 English Edition{]}.

4. ``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~{}development of the bourgeoisie, England is here
taken as the typical country, for its political development, France.
{[}Engels, 1888 English Edition{]}

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