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 labour?

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 organisation of
agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal
relations of property became no longer compatible with the
already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters.
They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a
social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the
economical and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern
bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange
and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic
means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is
no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he
has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history
of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of
modern productive forces against modern conditions of production,
against the property relations that are the conditions for the
existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to
mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put
on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the
entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only
of the existing products, but also of the previously created
productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises
there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would
have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of over-production.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary
barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of
devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence;
industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because
there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence,
too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at
the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development
of the conditions of bourgeo