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brief how the modern capitalist class developed from the earlier systems of society, and how the increase in the means of exchange and of commodities, the opening up of new markets and the discovery of new lands gave "an impulse never before known to commerce, to navigation, and to industry, and thereby also gave a more rapid development to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society of the time." Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie, which played a very revolutionary rôle, was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has obtained the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations … in one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, unashamed, direct brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage servants." All venerated opinions are swept away and all new ones become antiquated before they can ossify, and the consequence of all this is that man is at last compelled to face realities and to get a clearer insight into things.
The capitalist mode of production, once brought into being, "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt its own mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image." The capitalist system has concentrated vast masses of the population into huge towns. It has centralised the means of production and has concentrated property in few hands, and from this necessarily followed political concentration and the formation of the modern nations from the former loosely connected provinces. It has made the country subject to the town. In the same way, it rendered barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on more civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of capitalists, the East on the West. (Since then, of course, the East has been awakening, and is necessarily itself rapidly becoming bourgeois, showing in its development, in spite of all the peculiarities of the
