The Communist Manifesto | Page 7

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 his maintenance, and for the
propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore
also of labour, 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 labour
increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases,
whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work
exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal
master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of
labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised 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 over-looker, 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 labour, in
other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is
the labour of men superseded by that of women.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 labour, more or less expensive to use, according
to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer 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, 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 the 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 labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory,
then by the operatives 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 labour, 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 labourers 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 bourgeoisie. 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
equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of
labour, 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 unceasing 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