The Communist Manifesto | Page 6

and has concentrated property in a few
hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation.
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, canalisation 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 labour?
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 organisation 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 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 entire
bourgeois society. 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 civilisation, 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 inforced 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 labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who
find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers,
who must sell themselves piece-meal, 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 labour, 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