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 cosmopolitan character to production and
consumption in every country … 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 working men have no country. We
cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first
of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the
nation, must itself constitute the nation, it is, so far, itself national,
though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
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 bourgeois 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 its 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 civilisation, 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 they are
fettered, and as soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into
the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.
The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth
created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over 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 more thorough exploitation of the old
ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive
crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
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