The bourgeoisie, by opening up the world market, has made the production and consumption of all nations universal. Much to the regret of the reactionaries, the bourgeoisie has torn away the national foundations at the foot of industry. The old national industries were wiped out, and are being wiped out every day. They have been pushed out by new industries, the establishment of which has become a matter of life for all civilized peoples; These industries are no longer working with local materials, but with materials that come from faraway places; Their products are consumed not only at home but also around the world. The old needs to be satisfied by the products of the country are replaced by new needs to be satisfied by the products of faraway countries and regions. The old state of local and national self-sufficiency and isolation has been replaced by intercommunication and interdependence among peoples in all respects. This is as true of material production as it is of spiritual production. The spiritual products of all nationalities have become public property. As the one-sidedness and limitation of the nation become increasingly impossible, a kind of world literature has been formed from many kinds of national and local literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all the means of production and by the utmost convenience of communication, draws into civilization all nations, even the most savage. The low prices of its goods are the heavy weapon with which it destroys all walls and subjugates the most obstinate xenophobia of the barbarians. It compels all nations -- if they do not want to perish
Adopting the bourgeois mode of production; It forces them to impose on themselves what is called civilization, that is, to become bourgeois. In a word, it creates a world for itself in its own image.
The bourgeoisie subjugated the countryside to the rule of the cities. It created great cities, which greatly increased the population of the cities compared with that of the countryside, and thus freed a large part of the inhabitants from the stupidity of rural life. Just as it subordinated the countryside to the cities, so it subordinated the uncivilized and semi-civilized nations to the civilized nations, the peasant nation to the bourgeois nation, and the East to the West.
The bourgeoisie is eliminating day by day the dispersion of the means of production, property and population.
It concentrates population, means of production, and property in the hands of a few. The inevitable result is political concentration. The separate, almost confederate regions, each with different interests, laws, governments, and customs duties, have now been united into a single people with a single government, a single law, a single national class interest, and a single tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its less than one hundred years of class rule, has created more productive forces than have been created by all previous generations. Conquer the forces of nature, machine, chemical application in industry and agriculture, the motion of the ship, railway traffic, the use of cables, the reclamation of the entire continent, navigable rivers, as if large populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a to have such forces slumbered in the lap of social Labour productivity?
It is thus evident that the means of production and the means of exchange on which the bourgeoisie was formed were created in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and means of exchange, the feudal relations in which production and exchange took place, the feudal agricultural and handicraft organizations and, in a word, the feudal relations of ownership no longer suited the developed productive forces. This relationship is already hindering production rather than promoting it. It becomes a shackle to production. It had to be destroyed, and it has been destroyed.
In its place came free competition and the social and political systems compatible with it, bourgeois economic and political domination.