The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles
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This statement is almost true. There were class struggles in Europe, yes: the Lords and Serfs, the dictators, etc. but some countries were not like that anymore. The countries who were saved from Communism, I mean. They were saved because they did NOT have class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
All this is true in the lands where dictatorship ruled, like the French revolution.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
If he is talking about free countries, I really don’t know where he saw it? Where in the world did he live, this Marx guy?
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.
Uh- huh. But these “camps” are only hostile as long as they stay in those “camps”. In a free country a pauper can, and eventually will, become rich. So now he switched camps didn’t he? Toward whom shall he be “hostile” now? But OK, let’s read on…
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
There you go: again he is pulling his arguments from dictatorships. chartered burghers, see? chartered burghers
Definition of Charted : A document issued by a sovereign, legislature, or other authority, creating a public or private corporation, such as a city, college, or bank, and defining its privileges and purposes
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
tottering indeed. The feudal society should have died out a long time before then.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.
Sounds good, so what’s the problem?
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production
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Excellent. This led to all the wonderful inventions that we can’t live today without, like the computer, for example.
The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
If you were wondering, bourgeois means middle class shop keepers and merchants. I guess they became rich. ( what was the matter, Marx, you disagreed with the selling of material goods and earning (collecting) material riches? You decided to sell your dubious ideas and collect human souls, by making them feel guilty?)
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
This is a beautiful summery of the wonderful industrial revolution
