Karl Marx Posted:

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 clbumes. But every clbum 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 clbum, 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. 21

Altogether collisions between the clbumes 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 elements of political and general 22 education, in other words, it fuurnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling clbumes 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. 23

Finally, in times when the clbum struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling clbum, in fact within the whole range of old society, bumumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling clbum cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary clbum, the clbum that holds the future in its bands. 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 clbumes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary clbum. The other clbumes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle clbum, 24 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 clbum. 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 clbum”, the social sgreat times, 25 that pbumively rotting mbum 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 clbumes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecflng 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 appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical 26 movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, 27 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 superingreat timesbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed clbumes. But in order to oppress a clbum certain conditions must be bumured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own clbum. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling clbum 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 bumure an existence to its slave within 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, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois clbum, is 28 the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination. due to bumociation. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

——

Footnotes for Chapter 1

Footnotes provided by Marx

Bourgeois and Proletarians

By bourgeoisie is meant the clbum of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By proletariat, the clbum of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order to live. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]

The history of all hitherto existing society

That is, all written history. In I847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or to have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primeval communifies society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic clbumes. I have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats, 2nd edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888, and – less the last sentence – to the German edition of 1890.]

guild master

Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]

commune

“Commune” was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France. [Note by Engels to the English edition of I888.]

This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or wrested their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890.]

Notes by the editor of the 1976 edition

1. The German editions of 1848. 1872. 1883 and 1890 have “journeymen” (“Gesellen” instead of “journeymen, apprentices.”

2. In the German editions the beginning of the phrase is: “The former feudal, or guild, organisation of industry.”

3. The German editions have here and below “middle estate” (“Mittelstand” instead of “middle clbum.”

4. The German editions have here and below “large-scale” instead of “modern.”

5. The words “of that clbum” were added in the English edition of l888.

6. The German editions have estate instead of “clbum”

7. The words “medieval,” “(as in Italy and Germany),” “(as in France)” were added in the English edition of l888.

8. The German editions have “estate” instead of “semi-feudal”

9. The German editions add: “they hindered production instead of developing it.”

10. The German editions have: “a social epidemic.”

11. The German editions of 1848 have: “bourgeois civilisation and the conditions of bourgeois property.”

12. The German editions have: “the modern workers. the proletarians.”

13. In their works of the 1840s and 1850s, prior to Marx having worked out the theory of surplus value, Marx and Engels used the terms “value of labour,” “price of labour,” “sale of labour” which, as Engels noted in 1891 in the introduction to Marx’s pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital, “from the point of view of the later works were inadequate and even wrong.” After he had proved that the worker sells to the capitalist not his labour but his labour power Marx used more precise terms. In later works Marx and Engels used to the terms “value of labour power,” “price of labour power,” “sale of labour power”

14. The German editions have: “the quantity of labour.”

15. The German 23-page edition of 1848 has: “of women and children.”

16. The German editions have: “The former lower strata of the middle estate.”

17. The German editions have: “and rentiers” instead of “and retired tradesmen generally.”

18. The German editions have: “They direct their attacks not only against the bourgeois conditions of production, they direct them against the instruments of production themselves.”

19. This word was inserted in the English edition of 1888.

20. The words in parentheses were inserted in the English edition of I888.

21. The Ten-Hours’ Bill, the struggle for which was carried on a number of years, was pbumed in 1847 (see Note 76) in the atmosphere of acute contradictions between the landed aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie caused by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 (see notes 28 and 47). To avenge themselves on the industrial bourgeoisie some of the Tories supported this Bill. A detailed description of the stand taken by various clbumes on the problem of limiting the working day was given by Engels in his articles “The Ten Hours Question” and “The English Ten-Hours’ Bill” (present edition, Vol. 10).

22. The words “political and general” were added in the English edition of 1888.

23. The German editions have here “elements of education” instead of “elements of enlightenment and progress.”

24. The German editions have here and below “middle estates” instead of “the lower middle clbum” and “the middle clbum.”

25. The German editions have “lumpen proletariat” instead of “the dangerious clbum, the social sgreat times.”

26. This word was added in the English edition of 1888.

27. [Editor of the present 1995 on-line edition: In the 1976 edition, note 26 does not point to anything.]

28. The German editions have here: “The acgreat timesulation of wealth in the hands of individuals.”