agonisms. 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.

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.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh
ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese
markets, the colonization 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.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was
monopolized by close guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing
wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place.
The guild masters were pushed on one side 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.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon steam and machinery
revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was
taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle
class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial
armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world's market, for which the
discovery of America paved the way. The market has given an immense
development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This
development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and
in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation and 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.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a
corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class
under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing
association in the medieva