onal struggle
between classes. But every class struggle is a political
struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the
Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries,
the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few
years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and
consequently into a political party, is continually being upset
again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it
ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels
legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers,
by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie
itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society
further, in many ways, the course of 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 battles 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 its
own instruments of political and general education, in other
words, it furnishes 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 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 th