predestined for ultimate destruction due to its internal discrepancies. They will then bring rise to a new class, which has settled the discrepancies of its precursor but retains it own, which will cause its eventual passing. In more specific terms, Marx sketches the development of the capitalist bourgeoisie society from feudal society. “From the surfs of the middle ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.” (56)So Serfs gave rise to burghers who formed the beginnings of the new bourgeois class. The beginnings of European trade with America and the Far East contributed to the "rapid development" of "the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society"(56). New markets, which became unable to be supported by the feudal systems’ means of production, caused that system to be replaced by the "manufacturing system…. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in a single workshop." (56)And, so, by an inevitable historical process, "the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange."(57) And each of these has been "accompanied by a corresponding political advance in class."(57) At each new change, whichever class represented and controlled the modes of production were also the city policymakers, organizing the affairs of the state to best suit its conditions. In Marx’s words, "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie." (57)This idea of the “modes of production” is another recurring element in Marx’s conception of history. The factory process is one mode of production. The guild system as a whole was another, as was ...
