openly this
despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the
more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less skill and exertion of strength is implied in manual labor, in
other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is
the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and
sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working
class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use,
according to age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer so far
at an end that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by
the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper,
the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class--the small trades-people,
shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and
peasants--all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because
their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern
industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the
large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered
worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is
recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its
birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest
is carried on by individual laborers, then by the workpeople of a
factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against
the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their
attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against
the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares
that compete with their labor, they smash to pieces machinery, they set
factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of
the workman of the middle ages.

At this stage the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over
the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If
anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the
consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the
bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is
compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet,
for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians
do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of th