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climate and races inhabiting the Eastern hemisphere, similar features to the older bourgeois West.)
"During its rule of scarcely 100 years, the bourgeoisie has created more massive, more colossal productive force than all the preceding generations put together. …" But, as the fetters of feudalism had to be burst asunder to make room for the growth of capitalist production, so bourgeois society is becoming incompatible with the rapidly developing mode of production, and all the social, political and intellectual relations in society resulting therefrom. The very weapons with which capitalism beat feudalism are now turned against itself. The great expansion in production, which resulted in its triumph, will now also be the cause of its death. As an example of this, the Manifesto points to the ever more frequent occurrence of commercial crises in which there breaks out an "epidemic of over-production."
The bourgeoisie, however, has not only forged the weapon to be directed against itself, it has also produced the men who are to wield this weapon—the modern working class—the proletarians. The Manifesto then traces the rise of the proletariat, its relation to the capitalist, and how it is recruited from all classes of the population. From its birth, the working class is engaged in a conscious or unconscious struggle with the capitalist class. But the bourgeoisie itself is also constantly engaged in struggles—at first with the aristocracy, later, with those portions of the bourgeoisie whose interests are antagonistic to the further progress of industry, and at all times with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles the capitalist class is compelled in its own interests to call in the aid of the working class, and although the latter, without knowing it, is really fighting the battles of its worst enemy, it nevertheless in the process, learns the value of co-operative effort; it is dragged into the political arena, and is thus supplied by the capitalists themselves with the weapon with which it will slay them. Although the lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the handworker, and the peasant are all at war with the bourgeoisie, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. It is the peculiar and essential product of
