requirements of exchange developed by their means, were incompatible
with the existing historical surviving methods of production consecrated
by the law, that is to say the gilds and the innumerable personal and
other privileges (which for the unprivileged were only so many fetters)
of the feudal social organization. The forces of production brought into
being by the bourgeoisie rebelled against the methods of production
originated by the gildmasters and the feudal landlords; the result is
known; the feudal fetters were struck off, in England gradually, in
France at one blow; in Germany the process is not yet quite complete. As
manufacture came into conflict at a certain stage of progress with
feudal methods of production, so has the greater industry now joined
battle with the bourgeois organization of industry established in their
place. Bound by this system, owing to the narrow limits of the
capitalistic methods of production, there occurs on the one hand an
ever increasing conversion of the mass of the people into proletarians,
and on the other hand an ever increasing amount of products which cannot
be disposed of. Over-production, and suffering on the part of the
masses, the one the cause of the other, that is the absurd contradiction
in which it runs its course, and which of necessity requires a control
of the forces of production, through a change in the methods of
production.

In modern history, at least, it is therefore proved that all political
contests are class contests and that all fights of classes for
emancipation, in spite of their necessarily political form (for every
class struggle is a political struggle), finally, are directed towards
economic emancipation. Here, at least, therefore, the State, the
political arrangement is the subordinate, bourgeois society, the rule of
economic relations, the deciding element. The old fashioned philosophy
which even Hegel respected saw in the State the determining element and
in bourgeois society the element determined by it. Appearances
corresponded with this idea. As all the impulses of each single agent
pass through his individual brain and must transform themselves into
motives of his will in order to set him to work, so must also the
desires of bourgeois society, no matter which class happens to be
dominant, penetrate the will of the state in order to secure universal
validity in the form of laws. That is the formal side of the matter
which is self evident, the