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The history of
all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman
and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master 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 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 colonisation
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 monopolized
by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the
new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters
were pushed aside 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
manufacturers 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 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 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 in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of
the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval
commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there
taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward,
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 no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,
than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly
ecstasies of religious fervour, 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 into a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display
of vigour 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 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 form, 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 condition 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 connections 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 reactionaries, 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
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 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 commodities
are the heavy artillery 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 the 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 or 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; 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 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 the 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 maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of
a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production.
In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases,
the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery
and division of labor 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 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 overlooker, and, above all, in 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 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 their
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 portion 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 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 work of people 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 condition 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,
the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. 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 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 (trade 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 lie 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 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 proletarian, 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 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 genuinely 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 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 the feudal absolutism, managed to develop
into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, 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 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 bourgeoisie, in other words, its
existence is no longer compatible with society. |
