by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, 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, plebians, 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.
. . . .
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 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 into a mere money relation.
. . . .
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 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 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?
. . . 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? One 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.
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.
. . .
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.
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.
. . .
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.