England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further,
in many ways, the course of the development of the proletariat. The
bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with
the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie
itself whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of
industry; at all times with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In
all these countries it sees itself compelled to appeal to the
proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus to drag it into the
political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the
proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes
are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or
are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also
supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and
progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the
process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within
the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring
character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift,
and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in
its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the
nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the
bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion
of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level
of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie to-day,
the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other
classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the
proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the
artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save
from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They
are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are
reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by
chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their
impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their
present, but their future interests, they desert th