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modern industry, and is destined to bring about those new social relations and political conditions which will bring the latter into harmony with modern industrial development. As for the social scum, or, as it is known in German, the "lumpen proletariat," it may now and again be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution, but its whole condition of life is such as to make it the ever-ready, bribed tool of reaction. The Manifesto then proceeds: "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is (or must become) the self-conscious independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up without the whole super-incumbent strata of official society being blown into the air. …" The development of modern industry, therefore" (in the above and other ways) "cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie consequently produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."
In the second section the Manifesto first points out the relation of the communists (now read socialists) to the proletariat. The former have no interests apart from the latter; they are only the advance guard of the working class movement in all countries. Further, the ideas expressed by the communists have not been invented or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer. "They merely express in general terms, actual relations arising from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change, consequent upon the change in historical conditions." Communism does not propose the abolition of property in general, but of bourgeois private property, and a variety of still familiar objections to socialism are then dealt with. Says the Manifesto:—"You are horrified at our intention of doing away with private property. But in your existing
