Manifestoon - Jesse Drew Flashcards
The epoch of the bourgeoisie has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.
It has left no other bond between people than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has resolved personal worth into exchange value.
Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steamnavigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction.
