At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, andbroken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, thisis not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, whichclass, 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 fighttheir enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, thelandowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historicalmovement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victoryfor the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomesconcentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The variousinterests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, inproportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduceswages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resultingcommercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasingimprovement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and moreprecarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more andmore the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to formcombinations (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up therate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for theseoccasional 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 helpedon by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that placethe workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that wasneeded to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one nationalstruggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attainwhich the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, themodern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, iscontinually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it everrises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interestsof the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the tenhours' bill in England was carried.
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course ofdevelopment of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At firstwith the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests havebecome antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreigncountries. 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 theproletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishesthe proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance ofindustry, 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 goingon 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 therevolutionary 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 bourgeoisiegoes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who haveraised 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 areally revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of ModernIndustry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all thesefight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middleclass. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, forthey try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so inview of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but theirfuture interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The "dangerous class", [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrownoff by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by aproletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribedtool of reactionary intrigue.
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. Theproletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything incommon with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection tocapital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of everytrace 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 bysubjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot becomemasters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode ofappropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing oftheir own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, andinsurances 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 superincumbent strata of official societybeing sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at firsta national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters withits own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more orless veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out intoopen revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for thesway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism ofoppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must beassured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period ofserfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under theyoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on thecontrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below theconditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops morerapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit anylonger 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 slavewithin 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, itsexistence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formationand augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour restsexclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntarypromoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by therevolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore,cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriatesproducts. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its falland the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
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ayo? You finished the first chapter based. 🧡
