feudal slave labor. In bourgeois capitalism, however, there is a definite simplification in the breakdown of the classes – people who produce, and who do the work (the proletariat) and those who own the "modes of production" and pay them to work (the bourgeoisie). Wage labor, the selling of one's productive effort for money, will be the driving force of the next, inevitable historical change. "The work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman."(61) Workers divorced from the products they make, "who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital"(61) cannot but become alienated. In fact, Marx noted an increasing tempo of dissatisfaction in the decades immediately preceding the publication of the Communist Manifesto. "The history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they might overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property." (60)And so, "the weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself" (60), the very means by which the bourgeois secured themselves created the men who represent their opposite: The proletariat, "the modern working class." That the working class is becoming restless indicates the unfitness of the bourgeoisie to continue as a ruling class. This sets the stage for the next, and final stage of this progression: A revolution of the w...
