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 equalized, 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 (trade
unions) against the bourgeoisie; they club together in order to keep
up the rate of wages; they found permanent 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 furthered by
the improved means of communication which are created by modern
industry, and which place the workers of different localities in
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. But every class struggle
is a political struggle. And that union, which the burghers of the
Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries to
attain, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways achieve in a few
years.

  This organization 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 Hour
bill in England was carried.

  Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society
further the course of development of the proletariat in many ways. 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
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 old 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 adopt that of the proletariat.

  The "dangerous class," the social scum (Lumpenproletariat), 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.

  The social conditions of the old society no longer exist for the
proletariat. The proletarian is without property; his relation to
his wife and children has no longer anything in common with
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.