[Victus Mortuum]

Welcome, one and all, to the mysterious and noumenal writings of Victus Mortuum. He is a curious being whose frequent comedy and brilliant mind work together to form a person with an eloquent essence. All discussion within this thread should be edifying to all participants, while enjoying a character of freedom as well.

I will eventually post some of my thoughts/writings. If you want to discuss anything other than casually, please make a thread about it in the appropriate sub forum. This thread is not meant for debate, but for light-hearted conversation.

So, if I may ask, how much does anyone reading this know about Marxism?

[Godslilrosebud]

Karl Marx started it.





Eer, yeah. That's about all I know. *grins*

[RK_lover]

I don't know a whole lot, besides the fact that Hitler was violently opposed to it....we didn't get into much detail in my history class this semester. Feel free to enlighten me!

By the way, the waffle reference in your title automatically makes you awesome.

[Chrysostom]

We read some of Das Kapital and a few lesser writings in one of my political philosophy classes in college, and while I've not read most of his Capital I've got the Marx-Engels Reader. I'm mostly aquainted with his tradition through more recent thought that has been to some significant extent inspired by Marx: existentialism, cultural studies, critical theory, etc.

[Victus Mortuum]

Originally Posted by Godslilrosebud

Karl Marx started it.





Eer, yeah. That's about all I know. *grins*

And quite right you are. Orthodox Marxism is usually considered to be based on the writings of Karl Marx and his lifelong friend Frederich Engels.

Originally Posted by RK_lover

I don't know a whole lot, besides the fact that Hitler was violently opposed to it....

Indeed he was. As was America.

we didn't get into much detail in my history class this semester. Feel free to enlighten me!

By the way, the waffle reference in your title automatically makes you awesome.

I thank you for attributing such awesomeness onto me.

Originally Posted by Chrysostom

We read some of Das Kapital and a few lesser writings in one of my political philosophy classes in college, and while I've not read most of his Capital

Ah, Das Kapital. His uncompleted Magnus Opus. What a great read. I do wish he hadn't gotten so very sick and died younger than he expected, so that he could have completed his economic theory and moved on from it. There are a lot of holes yet to be filled in, even now.

I've got the Marx-Engels Reader. I'm mostly aquainted with his tradition through more recent thought that has been to some significant extent inspired by Marx: existentialism, cultural studies, critical theory, etc.

Inspired, perhaps, but significantly strayed from him (for otherwise they would be led to the same conclusions as he was.)

Anyway, here is the first chapter to the Manifesto of the Social Proletocrats that I am writing:

I – The Human Being and a Brief History

The human being has become the dominant life form on our humble planet Earth. The human, just like every other animal, has certain definite needs to be satisfied. The difference between humans and the other animals is that humans have the ability to perform their actions in their minds and work them through in imagination before they ever do anything in reality. In other words, humans are the only animals that do not take nature as it appears in front of them to satisfy their needs, they actively manipulate nature to best satisfy their needs based on their mental manipulations of nature.

Humans can satisfy their needs either directly (as with an object that is consumed) or indirectly (as with an object that goes into the production of an object of consumption). These objects that satisfy needs are called use-values, or objects of utility. Their use-value is their ability to satisfy a human need. The process of humans changing nature in order to create use-values is called labor. To be a use-value, something need not be the product of labor, as long as the object of nature satisfies some human need (e.g. air, uncultivated land, etc). The amount of labor that is required to obtain a use-value is measured as the object’s value.

The use-values that directly satisfy needs are called the means of consumption, while the use-values that indirectly satisfy needs are called means of production. It is in the perpetual interest of humankind that the amount of labor necessary to obtain a use-value decreases. The method that this increase in labor productivity is achieved is through the increase in productivity of the means of production, so that it requires less human labor to create those use-values. The means of production will, therefore, consistently be revolutionized throughout all of history, entirely independent of the will of any individual human beings.

In the process of performing labor, humans must necessarily interact with one another and with the means of production, independently of their will. Each human, therefore, has certain, definite economic relations to both other humans and to the means of production. The relationship that each person has to the means of production used in the laboring process, or the property relations each person has, along with the relations they have with other humans, defines their economic class. The totality of the relations of production of all the humans who interact with one another form the economic base of society, upon which the superstructure of society: the state, family, religion, intellect, etc. is constructed, which correspond to a definite social consciousness. This economic base of society is called its mode of production. The mode of production conditions the processes of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.

When humanity first enters the story of the world, it has no means of production to speak of; they are at a supremely low level of development. The mode of production that was necessarily formed was tribalism. Tribalism was an economically classless society, where equality ruled. Due to the sheer lack of property, what little production there was, was organized according to the aims of the producers, and what little product there was, was held in common. Upon that economic base was constructed the social superstructure that was characteristic of that era.

Tribalism knew nothing of property, and therefore when the means of production advanced to a level where property became a growing concern, it was doomed to collapse. Independently of humanity’s will, the next economic system was ushered in. Nonexistence of property was crushed in favor of slave property. The economic system that followed tribalism was that of dominism, or slave economy. Upon this new economy was constructed the social superstructure that is familiar with that stage in history.

Thus began the series of social revolutions with economic revolution at their core. Over time, the productivity of the means of production comes into conflict with the existing property relations and mode of production that are built around the less productive means of production. These new means of production eventually cause the old property relations and mode of production to collapse. This begins the period of social revolution, positioned between the eras of different modes of production.

During these social revolutions, the opposing classes battle it out uninterrupted, now hidden, and now open. These fights each time end with either the social reconstruction of society in the favor of the victorious revolutionary class or with the common ruin of the contending economic classes and the rising up out of the ruins of the old society a new revolutionary class and a new mode of production.

Dominism was the beginning of economic class society and class struggle. But, in dominism, master and slave were not the only economic classes. There were also peasants who owned their own lands and farmed for themselves. There were landowners and usurers. Dominism had within it a complicated series of economic classes, of economic graduation.

But, the means of production continued advancing. Soon, dominism was no longer able to handle the efficiency of the means of production, and slowly came the next social revolution. This revolution, just as the former, was a revolution of the minority. In the same way as the slave owners radically revolted and set up slave property, the growing land owning lords and guild-masters tossed aside slave property and replaced it with feudal property. They set down the system of dominism and set up the system of feudalism.

Feudalism, just as dominism, was a system of oppressor and oppressed (Lords and serfs, guild-masters and journeymen). Also, feudalism was a system, just as dominism was, where there was still a multitude of economic classes. There were still self-sustaining peasant farmers, and merchants who traveled from town to town. The main lever of production, though, had changed. Thus, feudalism established itself as the mode of production.

Well there you have it. Chapter One in all its glory. If you have any simple questions or discussion, you can put it here, but if you want to go deeper, I ask that you copy that chapter and paste it in the G and E sub forum for discussion.

[slap_j]

I'm a big fan of Marxism.

[Demon_Hunter]

Just thought Id pop in and say hi.

So... hai.

And sorry for the razzing I gave you in the NM forum. I tend to do that to new members.

I dont have the time to read that whole chapter that you posted, but what I did get to read was interesting. Later Ill try to finish it.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

[Victus Mortuum]

II – Bourgeois and Proletarians

Eventually, the feudal mode of production became incompatible with the advancing means of production and was replaced by the revolutionary class to establish our modern mode of production. Within feudalism, the revolutionary class was the petty-bourgeois class, but particularly the merchants. They were the first to gain control of the means of production as capital, and they were, yet again, the minority. They slowly began to take over those guilds masters and land owners that they bought from, and soon established, in place of the old feudal property and feudal labor, capital property and wage labor. The new economic system that was established was capitalism.

The modern bourgeois economy that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal economy has not done away with class struggle. It has only established new classes, with new conditions of economic oppression, with new forms of struggle in place of the old.

Our era, the era of the bourgeoisie, possesses however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class struggle. Our economic classes are being split more and more into to great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat. This simplification into bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and circulating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

The discovery of America opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The early East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in goods generally, gave to commerce, navigation, and industry, an impulse never before known, and therefore led to its economic revolutionary element in the collapse of the feudal economy, and the bourgeoisie’s rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was controlled by closed guilds, no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system then took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished and was replaced with the division of labor in each individual workshop.

Meanwhile, the markets continued to grow, the demand for goods continued rising. The manufacturers now no longer could fill the need. From there came the industrial revolution: steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was replaced by the giant: modern industry. The larger industrial middle class was replaced by a tiny class of corporate millionaires: the leaders of the industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. The world market has given an immense development to commerce, transportation, and communication; electricity, computers, and entertainment. This development then reacted back on the extension of industry. In proportion as industry increased so too did commerce, transportation, and communication. In the same proportion, the bourgeoisie developed and grew, increased its capital, and pushed into the scrapheap of the past all other economic classes handed down from the feudal economy.

We can see then, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of economic development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Along with each step in the development of the bourgeoisie came a corresponding political advance of that economic class. Firstly, an oppressed class under the feudal nobility, then an armed and self governing medieval association: here independent urban republic; there a taxable ‘third estate’ of the monarchy. Later in the period of manufacturing, serving the semi-feudal or absolute monarchy against the feudal nobility – and finally, the bourgeoisie has established, in the wake of modern industry and the world market, its exclusive political control in the modern representative state. The leaders of the modern state are but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

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, slave, and tribal economic relations. It has relentlessly destroyed the feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’ and has left no other relation between people other than empty self-interest, than cold ‘cash payment’. It has drowned out the most joyous highs of religious belief, of altruistic enthusiasm, of gentle sentimental care, in the icy waters of self-centered calculation. Personal worth has been reduced to the value of ones ability to perform labor, and in place of numberless other economic ‘freedoms’ of the past, it has established that one, ‘absolute’ freedom – Free Trade. In one word, replaced economic exploitation veiled by illusions, with open, direct economic exploitation.

Modern industry has stripped of its pride every occupation previously honored and looked upon with reverence. It has converted the doctor, the farmer, the priest, the artist, the retailer, the scientist, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental appearance, and has reduced the family relation to a mere economic dependency and money relation.

The bourgeoisie has been the first to show what man’s social activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has taken on projects that put in the shade all former accomplishments of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. 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 ancient prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones are dissolved before they can solidify. All that is solid melts into air, all which 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 has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a universal and common character to production and consumption in every country. To the great anger of the reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work on local raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.

In place of the old needs, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new needs, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have international trading, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all means of production, by the immense power of the means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians’ intense hatred of foreigners to subside. It compels all nations, by fear of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst (i.e. to become bourgeois themselves). In a word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made undeveloped and semi-developed countries dependent on the civilized and developed ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois.

The bourgeoisie, with their powerful nations around the world, try to spread their markets and sell their products in as many locations as possible. The bourgeois nations, or imperialist nations, battle it out for the markets of the rest of the world. This battle breaks out periodically into an open world war, into an imperial crisis. At the end of the war, the successful imperialists divide up the world markets between themselves. As new bourgeois nations rise up, the battles over markets break out again, and war breaks out once more.

The bourgeoisie upon their discovery of paper money, have viciously taken advantage of its property of inflation. The value of the money continually decreases, causing prices to continually increase, but wages are perpetually held down by increasing them at a lower rate than that of inflation. The true wealth of the world is transferred ever more from the workers to the bourgeoisie.

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 brought together the population, centralized the means of production, and concentrated property over the means of production into the hands of a few. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected governments, with separate interests, laws, structures, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation with one government, one code of laws, one objective, and one national class interest.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce three 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, electrical power, automobiles, telephones, computers, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization, oil drilling, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a thought that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

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 organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in a word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became outdated. They had to be destroyed. They were destroyed.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and the economic 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 demon of hell that he has called up by his spells. For over a century, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of the means of production against the relations 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, credit, and imperial 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 means of production, get periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier eras, would have seemed absurd – the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into the state of momentary economic barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, has cut off the supply of every means of consumption; industry and commerce seem to have been destroyed.

And why? Because there is too much civilization, too many means of consumption, to much industry, too much exchange. The means of production at the disposal of society no longer further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for those conditions, they are made useless, and so soon they overcome these impediments, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are incapable of dealing with the wealth they create.

And how do the bourgeoisie overcome these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the creation of even more credit. 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 bourgeoisies defeated feudalism are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death upon itself; it has also called into existence the persons 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 ‘freely’ sell themselves, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the violence 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 many of the proletarians has lost its individual character, and, consequently, its charm for the workers. They become appendages of the machine, appendages of the workplace, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of most workers. Hence, the cost of production of a worker is limited, almost entirely, to the means of consumption that they require for maintenance, and for the propagation of their class at its current, or at a lower, social level. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is based on the labor required to reproduce it. In proportion, hence, as the working conditions decrease, wages tend to decrease. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportions the burden of toil also increases, whether by a prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of work required in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the lord and master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist, into the skyscrapers of the financial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into their workplaces, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants, higher regiments of their own economic class. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, and above all, by the individual bourgeois capitalist himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims universal benefit to be its end and aim, the more petty, and the more embittering it is.

The more modern industry has developed, the more is the labor of men also filled in by women, the labor of whites also filled in by other races, and the labor of adults filled in by teenagers. Differences in age, race, and sex have no longer any distinctive economic or social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use based on their stratum of their class.

This does not exclude, though, those who perform less physical labor, and more mental labor. All workers who must sell their labor to others are members of the proletariat class. Teachers, factory workers, farm hands, service workers, managers, financial workers, etc. are all united beneath their economic masters.

No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by his particular capitalist completed, than he receives his wages in cash and is exploited by other portions of the bourgeoisie: the land owner, the retail store owner, the bank owner, the state, etc.

The middle class – the shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, peasants and merchants: the petty-bourgeois class – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their small capital is not enough to be on the scale 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.

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 laborers, then by the work of the people of a single workplace, then by all the workers of a trade in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. At this stage, the proletarians are misguided; they do not understand the reasons for their economic position. They direct their attacks not at the bourgeois mode of production, but against the means of production themselves; they destroy technology that competes with their labor, they smash machinery to pieces, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the worker in the feudal economy.

At this stage, the laborers still form a disorganized 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 is, in order to attain its own political ends, compelled to set the whole proletariat into action, and can, for a time, do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies: the remnants of monarchy, the feudal lords, the petty-bourgeois, etc. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory 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 within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and drops wages lower. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial, credit, and imperial crises make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery and the increasing fluctuations of inflation make their livelihood more and more unstable; the collisions between individual workers and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. The workers begin to form unions against the bourgeois; but even at this stage, the proletariat still does not have it clear in their consciousness the causes of their economic oppression. Thus, they club together in order to keep up wages, and they work for better contracts and conditions, but they do not yet aim their attacks at the bourgeois mode of production; they found permanent associations in order to keep the class strong and prepared for the next battle. 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 lie not in the immediate results, but in the ever expanding union of workers, and the ever clearer idea of the economic battle taking place. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers all over the world into contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. The more centralized this struggle becomes, the more the proletariat becomes conscious of the economic battle happening before its eyes. And that union, which for the petty-bourgeois of the feudal era, with their miserable footpaths, required centuries, the modern proletariat, thanks to the internet and telephones, can achieve in a few years.

This organization of the proletarians into a class is continually being upset by competition between the workers themselves, and by the continual suppression from the bourgeois state. But it ever rises up again: stronger, firmer, and mightier.

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 feudal aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests are now against 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 help, and thus drag it into the economic arena of battle. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of 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 class are, by the advance of industry, forced 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 progress of destruction going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of bourgeois society, assumes such a violent , glaring character, that a small section of the bourgeoisie cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, in the earlier period of social transformation, a section of the nobility sided with 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 the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The petty-bourgeois: the shopkeeper, the peasant, the handicraft worker, and the merchant, 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, they are reactionary, trying to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so 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 bourgeois society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletariat revolution; its conditions of life, however, as criminals and terrorists, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary warfare.

In the condition of the proletariat, the relations of old society at large are already virtually destroyed. The proletarians go without the control over any means of production; their relations to their family have no longer anything in common with the bourgeois ‘ideal family’; modern labor, the same in America as in China, Russia as in Sweden, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, religion, family, and state, are to him just bourgeois prejudices, within which hide just as many bourgeois interests.

All previous social movements were the movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest part of our modern society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself, without the whole base and superstructure of modern society being toppled to the ground.

The struggle of the proletariat appears in form at first to be a national struggle due to the separate bourgeois states that stand in the way of a proletarian revolution. But the proletariat, as we have seen, has no nationalities. The proletariat of each country must, though, first 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 overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the rule of the proletariat.

Previously, nearly every form of society has been based, as we have seen, on the conflict between oppressing and oppressed class. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions for the survival of that class must be met, so that it can continue its slavish existence. The serf, during the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the community, the petty-bourgeoisie, under feudal monarchy, developed to the level of bourgeoisie. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with industry, sinks deeper into the absolute stagnation of his class. Here it becomes evident that the bourgeois are no longer fit to rule, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as law. It is incompetent because it cannot assure the steady and growing existence of its laborer, the proletariat, within its mode of production, because it cannot help letting him stagnate. Because the means of production are now so powerful that capitalism can no longer handle them, creating ever more dangerous and explosive crises, where there is an enormous excess of products, which drives the proletariat into the absolute lacking of those products. The bourgeois has become unfit to rule society; it is no longer compatible with the means of production.

The essential conditions for the existence and dominance of the bourgeois class are the continual formation and growth of capital. The condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between laborers. The advance of the means of production, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the workers, due to competition, with a revolutionary union, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, pulls from beneath its feet, the very foundation of the bourgeois mode of production. What the bourgeois produces, above all other things, are its own grave-diggers. The fall of the bourgeoisie and the rise of the proletariat are both equally inevitable.

[Jacob Richter]

^^^ Slow down, there, companero! The language resembles the Manifesto's 19th-century "poetry" too much (and then there's the PM stuff I sent you just now).