Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

BRUSSELS 161

revolutionary role of the proletariat: the lower-middle class were in fact

reactionary in that they tried to roll back the wheel of history; and the

'dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off

by the lower layers of society',^153 was ripe for bribery by reactionary

intrigue. Marx summed up this section with the words:

The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bour-

geoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by

their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development

of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foun-

dation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products.

What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-

diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.^154

Obviously Marx was here projecting into the future tendencies he saw at
work in the present. In Germany at that time the proletariat in fact
comprised less than 5 per cent of the population, and even in England
the rule of the bourgeoisie was far from being 'universal'.
In the second section Marx raised the question of the relationship of
the communists to the proletariat as a whole. The communists were not
opposed to other working-class parties; their interests were those of the
proletariat as a whole. Two factors distinguished them from other
working-class groups: they were international, and they understood the
significance of the proletarian movement. Communist ideas were not
invented or discovered: they merely expressed actual relations springing
from an existing class struggle and could be summed up in a single
sentence: abolition of private property.
Marx then dealt with objections.
The first objection was that communists desired to abolish 'the right
of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour'.^155
His reply was that the property of the petty artisan and small farmer
was being abolished anyway by the power of capital; the proletariat did
not have any property; and capital, being a collective product and the
result of the united action of all members of society, should be owned
collectively. Private property was bourgeois property and all arguments
against its abolition were bourgeois arguments.
Similarly, in reply to a second criticism he argued that the abolition
of the family meant the abolition of the bourgeois family - whose counter-
part was the practical absence of family life among proletarians, and
public prostitution.
To meet a third objection Marx maintained that the real point about
the so-called 'community of women' was to do away with the status of