n. The cheap
prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters
down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely
obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations,
on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it
compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst,
_i.e._, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a
world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It
has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population
as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of
the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the
country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and
semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of
peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state
of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has
agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has
concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of
this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely
connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and
systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one
government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one
frontier, and one customs tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has
created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all
preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man,
machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam
navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents
for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out
of the ground--what earlier century had even a presentiment that such
productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange on whose
foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal
society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of
production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society
produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and
manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of