creased speed of the machinery, etc.

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the
patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial
capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are
organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they
are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers
and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class,
and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by
the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the
individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this
despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty,
the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual
labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes
developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of
women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive
social validity for the working class. All are instruments of
labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age
and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer,
so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is
set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord,
the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class--the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and
peasants--all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly
because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale
on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the
competition with the large capitalists, partly because their
specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of
production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes
of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development.
With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At
first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by
the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade,
in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly
exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the
bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments
of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that
compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they
set factories ablaze, they seek to rest