Historical Role of Bourgeoisie :- The bourgeoisie historically has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie wherever it has got upper hand has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal tie that bound man to his natural superiors, and has left remaining no other nexus between man & man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value & in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -Free Trade! In one word,for exploitation, veiled by religious & political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless,direct,brutal exploitation!! The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured & looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science , into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoise has torn away from the family its sentimental veil & has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation!! Bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production & thereby the relations of production & with them the whole relations of the society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uniterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty & agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient & venerable prejudices & options, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned & man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production & consumption in every country. To chargin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All established national industries have been destryed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life & death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zone; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands & claims. In place of old local & national seclusion & self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness & narrow-mindedness become more & more impossible, and from the numerous national & local literatures, their arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie by rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilatated means of communications,draw all,even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batter down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians intensity obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, to become bourgeoisie themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own images. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increase the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country depeendent on the towns, so it has made barbarian & semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeoisie, the East on the West. The bourgeoisie keeps more & more doing away with the scattered state of population, of the means of production & of property. It has agglomerated population, centeralized the means of production & has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, government & system of taxation, become lumped togather into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier & one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive & more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Natures forces to man, machinary, application of chemistry to industry & agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? We see then : the means of production & of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production & of exchages, the conditions under which feudal society produced & exchancged, feudal organization of agriculture & manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property become no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they become so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder ; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social & political constitution adapted in it, and the economic & political sway of the bourgeois class. Marx & Engels. 1847.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 02:48:25 +0000