property,
became no longer compatible with the already developed productive
forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be 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
bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the
existing products, but also of the previously created productive
forces, is periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an
epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an
absurdity--the epidemic of overproduction. 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 civilization, 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 bourgeois property; on the contrary,
they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are
fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring
disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of
bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow
to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie
get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a
mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new
markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That
is to say, by pa