The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market
given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in
every country. To the great chagrin of 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 up indigenous 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 wants, satisfied by the production of the
country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the
products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and
national seclusion and self-sufficiency we have intercourse in every
direction, universal inter-dependence 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 instruments of
production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws
all nations, even the most barbarian, into civilization. The cheap
prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it
batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians'
intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all
nations, on pain 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, and has thus rescued a
considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made
barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized
ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the
West.

  More and more the bourgeoisie keeps doing away with the scattered
state of the population, of the means of production, and of
property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of
production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The
necessary consequence of this was political centralization.
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, canalization 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, that the means of production and of exchange which
served as the foundation for the growth of the bourgeoisie 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 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 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
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 the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial,
each time more threateningly. 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 civilization, 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