not an exception,
or a derogation of an abstract principle, but the very process of
history.

Even as the modern proletariat involves the bourgeoisie, so the latter
cannot exist without the former. And both are the result of a process of
formation which rests altogether upon the new mode of production of the
objects necessary to life, that is to say, which rests altogether upon
the manner of economic production. The bourgeois society grew out of the
corporative and feudal society and it grew out of it through struggle
and revolution in order to take possession of the instruments and means
of production which all culminate in the formation, the development and
the multiplication of capital. To describe the origin and the progress
of the bourgeoisie in its different phases, to explain its successes in
the colossal development of technique and in the conquest of the world
market, and to point out the political transformations which followed
it, which are the expression, the defense and the result of these
conquests is, at the same time, to write the history of the proletariat.
The latter in its present condition is inherent in the epoch of
bourgeois society and it has had, it has, and will have as many phases
as that society itself up to the time of its extinction. The antithesis
of rich and poor, of happy and unhappy, of oppressors and oppressed is
not something accidental which can easily be put on one side as was
believed by the enthusiasts of justice. Still further it is a fact of
necessary correlation, once granted the directing principle of the
present form of production which makes the wageworker a necessity. This
necessity is double. Capital can only take possession of production by
converting laborers into proletarians and it cannot continue to live, to
be fruitful, to accumulate, to multiply itself and to transform itself
except on the condition of paying wages to those whom it has made
proletarians. The latter, on their side, can only live and reproduce
their kind on the condition of selling themselves as labor power, the
use of which is left to the discretion, that is to say, to the good
pleasure of the possessors of capital. The harmony between capital and
labor is wholly contained in this fact that labor is the living force by
which the proletarians continually put in motion and reproduce by adding
to it the labor accumulated in the capital. This connection resulting
from a development which is the whole inne