.

It is a negative side of the antithesis, the internal source of
unrest, the disintegrated and disintegrating proletariat.

The possessing class and the proletarian class represent the same
human self-estrangement. But the former class feels perfectly
satisfied with this self-estrangement, knowing that in this
estrangement resides its own power, and possesses therein the
semblance of a human existence; the latter class feels itself to be
destroyed by the estrangement, perceives therein its impotence and the
reality of an inhuman existence.

Within the antithesis, therefore, the owner of private property is the
conservative, and the proletarian is the destructive party. From the
former proceeds the action of maintaining the antithesis, from the
latter the action of destroying it. From the point of view of its
national, economic movement, private property is, of course,
continually being driven towards its own dissolution, but only by an
unconscious development which is independent of it, and which exists
against its will, and is limited by the nature of things; only, that
is, by creating the proletariat as proletariat, poverty conscious of
its own physical and spiritual poverty, and demoralized humanity
conscious of its own demoralization and consequently striving against
it.

The proletariat fulfils the judgment which private property by the
creation of the proletariat suspends over itself, just as it fulfils
the judgment which wage-labour suspends over itself in creating alien
riches and its own condemnation. If the proletariat triumphs, it does
not thereby become the absolute side of society, for it triumphs only
by abolishing itself and its opposite. In this way both the
proletariat and its conditioned opposite, private property, are done
away with.

FRENCH MATERIALISM

The French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and especially of
French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing
political institutions and against the existing religion and theology,
but equally an open and outspoken campaign against all metaphysics,
especially that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz.
Metaphysics was confronted with philosophy, just as Feuerbach, in his
first decisive stand against Hegel, opposed sober philosophy to
drunken speculation. The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, which
was driven from the field by the French Enlightenment, and especially
by the French materialism