the
industrial capitalist who carries on agriculture upon factory lines.
This industrial capitalist, on his part, who pays a rent to the land
owner, stands in a direct relationship to the latter. The abolition of
landed property is therefore the most important property question that
exists for the English industrial bourgeoisie, and the struggle
against the Corn Laws had no other meaning. The abolition of capital,
on the other hand, is the property question as understood equally by
the English agricultural labourer and by the English factory worker.

Both in the English and in the French Revolutions the property
question presented itself in such wise that it seemed to be imperative
to enforce free competition and to effect the abolition of all feudal
property relations, such as manorial rights, guilds, monopolies, which
had been transformed into fetters upon the industry which was
developing between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Lastly, in
"our time" the property question means the abolition of the
antagonisms which are produced by the great industry, the development
of the world market and of free competition.

The property question, according to the successive stages in the
development of industry, has always been the life question of a
particular class. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the
point at issue was the abolition of feudal property relations, the
property question was the life question of the bourgeois class. In the
nineteenth century, when the point at issue is the abolition of
bourgeois property relations, the property question is a life question
for the working class.

The property question, which in "our time" is a world-historical
question, has therefore a meaning only in the modern bourgeois
society. The more developed this society is, the more therefore the
bourgeoisie develops itself economically in a country, and
consequently the more the State power has assumed a bourgeois
expression, all the more acutely does the social question obtrude
itself, in France more acutely than in Germany, in England more
acutely than in France, in the constitutional monarchy more acutely
than in the absolute monarchy, in the Republic more acutely than in
the constitutional monarchy. Thus, for example, the crises in the
credit system and in speculation, etc., are nowhere more acute than in
North America. Nowhere, too, does social inequality obtrude itself
more harshly than in the Eastern St