ed, as we have already seen,
on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to
oppress a class certain conditions must be assured to it under which it
can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period
of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the
petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to
develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead
of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below
the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and
pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here
it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the
ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon
society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is
incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery,
because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has
to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live
under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer
compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the
bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the
condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on
competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose
involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the
laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due
to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts
from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie
produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the
victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

(a) By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of
the means of social production and employers of wage-labor. By
proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of
production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in
order to live.

(b) That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society,
the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all
but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of
land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social fo