re, flits from one class to another of the French people in a
dramatic movement, until it eventually reaches the class which will no
longer realize social freedom upon the basis of certain conditions
lying outside of mankind and yet created by human society, but will
rather organize all the conditions of human existence upon the basis
of social freedom. In Germany, on the other hand, where practical life
is as unintellectual as intellectual life is unpractical, no class of
bourgeois society either feels the need or possesses the capacity for
emancipation, unless driven thereto by its immediate position, by
material necessity, by its chains themselves.

Wherein, therefore, lies the positive possibility of German
emancipation?

Answer: In the formation of a class in radical chains, a class which
finds itself in bourgeois society, but which is not of it, an order
which shall break up all orders, a sphere which possesses a universal
character by virtue of its universal suffering, which lays claim to no
special right, because no particular wrong but wrong in general is
committed upon it, which can no longer invoke a historical title, but
only a human title, which stands not in a one-sided antagonism to the
consequences, but in a many-sided antagonism to the assumptions of the
German community, a sphere finally which cannot emancipate itself
without emancipating all the other spheres of society, which
represents in a word the complete loss of mankind, and can therefore
only redeem itself through the complete redemption of mankind. The
dissolution of society reduced to a special order is the proletariat.

The proletariat arises in Germany only with the beginning of the
industrial movement; for it is not poverty resulting from natural
circumstances but poverty artificially created, not the masses who are
held down by the weight of the social system, but the multitude
released by the acute break-up of society--especially of the middle
class--which gives rise to the proletariat. When the proletariat
proclaims the dissolution of the existing order of things it is merely
announcing the secret of its own existence, for it is in itself the
virtual dissolution of this order of things. When the proletariat
desires the negation of private property, it is merely elevating to a
general principle of society what it already involuntarily embodies in
itself as the negative product of society.

With respect to the nascent world the prolet