The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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READING 30. 3

Science and Technology

78 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style

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“have-nots” (antithesis) that would resolve in the synthesis

of a classless society. From Hegel, Marx also derived the

utopian idea of the perfectibility of the state. The end prod-

uct of dialectical change, argued Marx, was a society free

of class antagonisms and the ultimate dissolution of the

state itself.

Although Marx and Engels failed to anticipate capital-

ism’s potential to spread rather than to limit wealth, their

manifesto gave sharp focus to prevailing class differences

and to the actual condition of the European economy of

their time. Despite the fact that they provided no explana-

tion ofhowtheir classless society might function, their

apocalyptic call to revolution would be heeded in the

decades to come. Oddly enough, communist revolutions

would occur in some of the least industrialized countries of

the world, such as Russia and China, rather than in the

most industrialized countries, as Marx and Engels expect-

ed. Elsewhere, communists would operate largely through

nonrevolutionaryvehicles, such as labor unions and politi-

cal organizations, to initiate better working conditions,

higher wages, and greater social equality. But the anticom-

munist revolutions and the collapse of the communist gov-

ernment in the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century

reveal mounting frustration with the failure of most

Communist regimes to raise economic standards among

the masses. Although the Manifestodid not accurately

predict the economic destiny of the modern world, the

treatise remains a classic expression of nineteenth-century

social consciousness.

From Marx’s and Engels’

Communist Manifesto(1848)

I Bourgeois and Proletarians^1

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class 1

struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,

guild-master^2 and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and

oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried

on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that

each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of

society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a

complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a 10

manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have

patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages,

feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,

serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate

gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the

ruins of feudal society has not done away with class

antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new

conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the

old ones. 20

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however,

this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms.

Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great

hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other:

Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered

burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first

elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened

up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and 30

Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the

colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in

commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to

industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the

revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid

development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial

production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer

sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The

manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were 40

pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division

of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the

face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever

rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam

and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of

manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place

of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires—the

leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which 50

the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given

an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to

communication by land. This development has, in its turn,

reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as

industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same

proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and

pushed into the background every class handed down from the

Middle Ages.

1839 Charles Goodyear (American) produces industrial-

strength rubber

1846 Elias Howe (American) patents an

interlocking-stitch sewing machine

1866 the first dynamo, capable of generating massive

quantities of electricity, is produced

1876 Nikolaus Otto (German) produces a workable

internal-combustion engine

(^1) By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of
the means of social production and employers of wage labor.
By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having
no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their
labor power in order to live. [1888.]
(^2) Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not
a head of a guild. [1888.]