Proletarians of the world, unite!
Communist Party of China
The bourgeoisie has played a very revolutionary role in history.
The bourgeoisie has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations where it has gained dominance. It ruthlessly cut off all kinds of feudal fetter that bound people to natural dignity, and it made no other connection between people except naked interests and cold "cash transactions."
It drowns the sacred outbursts of piety, chivalry, and civic sentiment in the icy waters of egoism. It turns human dignity into exchange value, replacing countless chartered and self-earned freedoms with a kind of unconscioned freedom of trade.
In short, it replaces exploitation, masked by religious and political illusions, with open, shameless, direct, and explicit exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has obliterated all the hallowed aura of the profession which had always been revered and feared. It has turned doctors, lawyers, priests, poets, and scholars into paid laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn off the veil of tenderness from family relations and reduced them to one of pure money.
The bourgeoisie reveals that the barbarous use of manpower, so much admired by the reactionaries in the Middle Ages, is correspondently complemented by extreme sloth. It was the first demonstration of what human activity could achieve. It has created miracles quite different from the pyramids of Egypt, Roman waterways, and Gothic churches; It accomplished an expedition quite different from the great migrations of peoples and the Crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot survive unless it constantly revolutionizes the means of production, and thus the relations of production, and thus the relations of all society. On the contrary, the preservation of the old mode of production as it was, was the first condition for the survival of all the former industrial classes. The constant transformation of production, the ceaseless turbulence of all social conditions, the perpetual instability and change, are what distinguishes the bourgeois age from all previous ages. All fixed and inflexible relations, with their concomitant and venerated notions and opinions, are destroyed, and all newly formed relations become obsolete before they can be fixed. All things of order and of fixed covenant were blown away, and all that was sacred was profaned. At last men were forced to take a cool look at their place in life, their relations to each other.
The need to expand product sales constantly drove the bourgeoisie to run around the world.
It must be settled everywhere, developed everywhere, connected everywhere.
Marx and Engels and their families
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