The proletarian is without property; his relation
to his wife and children has no longer anything in
common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern
industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the
same in England as in France, in America as in
Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national
character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so
many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in
ambush just as many bourgeois interests. All the
preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought
to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting
society at large to their conditions of appropriation.
The proletarians cannot become masters
of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing
their own previous mode of appropriation, and
thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.
They have nothing of their own to secure and to
fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous
securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements
of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The
proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent
movement of the immense majority, in the
interest of the immense majority. The proletariat,
the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot
stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super-
incumbent strata of official society being sprung
into the air.
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