Umberto Boccioni, Mills at Porta Romana , 1908, 75 X 145, Milan, Private Collection The bourgeoisie has played a role in the history eminently revolutionary.
Wherever it has won power, it has trampled upon the feudal relations, patriarchal, idyllic. All the complex and varied uniting the feudal rights to his "natural superiors", she has shattered mercilessly for not leaving any other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, the harsh demands of the "cash payment ". She drowned religious ecstasy, chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation. She has made personal dignity simple exchange value, and has substituted for many freedoms, so dearly won, the only ruthless and free trade. In a word, instead of exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has a holding open, direct, brutal and shameful.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every profession hitherto deemed venerable and venerated. Doctor, lawyer, priest, poet, scholar, she has made to its employees wages.
The bourgeoisie has torn the veil of sentimentality that covered the family relationship and has reduced to nothing more than simple reports of money. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how the brutal demonstration of force in the Middle Ages so admired by the reaction, finds its natural complement in The most crass laziness. It is she who first proved that human activity can do: it has created any other marvels as the pyramids of Egypt, the Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals, it has led many other expeditions the ancient migrations of peoples and the Crusades.
The bourgeoisie is only on the condition of constantly revolutionizing the instruments of labor, which means the mode of production, which means that all social relations. Conservation of the old mode of production was, however, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. This disruption continuous modes of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All social relations, traditional and rigid, with their attendant beliefs and ideas accepted and venerated, dissolve, their replacements are becoming obsolete before it crystallizes. All that was solid and stable is shaken, all that is holy is profaned, and men are forced, finally, to consider their lives and their interrelationship with eyes sobered.
Driven by the need of constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the entire globe. It must nestle everywhere, everywhere exploit, create means of communication everywhere.
By exploiting the world market, the bourgeoisie given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. Much to the chagrin of reactionaries, it has deprived the industry the national ground. The old industries are destroyed or about to be. They are dislodged by new industries whose introduction becomes a life or death for all civilized nations, industries who no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest regions, and whose products are consumed, not only domestically, but in all corners of the globe.
In place of old wants, satisfied by domestic products, find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of the most distant countries and the most diverse climates. Instead of the old national isolation sufficient unto themselves, developed a traffic universal interdependence of nations. And what is true for material production applies to intellectual production. Intellectual works of a nation become the common property of all. The narrowness and exclusiveness of national becoming daily more impossible, many national and local literatures to form a world literature.
by the rapid development of the instruments of production and improved immensely facilitated means of communication leads to the bourgeoisie in the course of civilization to the most barbarous nations. The cheapness of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, made surrender the barbarians' intensely obstinate hostile to foreigners. Under pain of death, it forces all nations to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, it forces them to bring home the so-called civilization, that is to say, to become bourgeois. In short, it shapes the world in its image.
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto , 1848
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