ving the way for more extensive and more destructive
crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground
are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield
those weapons--the modern working class--the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, _i.e._, capital, is developed, in the
same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class,
developed; a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find
work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.
These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity,
like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to
all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the
market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the
work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and,
consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of
the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most
easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of
production of a workman is restricted almost entirely to the means of
subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the
propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore
also of labor, is equal, in the long run, to its cost of production.
In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases,
the wage decreases. Nay, more, in proportion as the use of machinery
and division of labor increase, in the same proportion the burden of
toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by
increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of
the machinery, etc.

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal
master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of
laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As
privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a
perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves
of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and
hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-seer, and, above all, by
the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more