The Communist Manifesto | Page 8

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 lies, 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 centralise 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 proletarians,
thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation 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 times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it
sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and
thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore,
supplies the proletariat with its own instruments 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 classes
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
process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within
the whole range of 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 really 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 so
only 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 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 conditions 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 industrial labour, 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