" (82). This bourgeois ascendancy has, though, created a new social class that labor in the new bourgeois industries. These classes, the proletariat, "wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live," are the necessary consequence of bourgeois modes of production (79). As bourgeois industries expand and increase their own capital, the ranks of the proletariat swell as other classes of society, artisans and small business owners, cannot compete with the bourgeois capitalists. Additionally, the development of bourgeois industries causes a proportional deterioration in the condition of the proletariat. This deterioration, which can be slowed but not stopped, creates within the proletariat a revolutionary element that will eventually destroy their bourgeois oppressors. As Marx says, "What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable" (94). In Chapter 2, "Proletariats and Communists," Marx elaborates the social changes communists hope to effect on behalf of the proletariat. Marx notes firstly that the interests of communists do not differ from the interests of the proletariat as a class; they seek only to develop a class-consciousness in the proletariat, a necessary condition of eventual proletariat emancipation. The primary objective of communists and the revolutionary proletariat is the abolition of private property, for it is this that keeps them enslaved. Bourgeois economics, i.e., capitalism, requires that the owners of the means of production compensate workers only enough to ensure their mere physical subsistence and reproduction. In other words, the existence of bourgeois property, or capital as Marx calls it, relies on its radically unequal distribution. The only way the proletariat can free itself from bourgeois exploitation is to abolish capitalism. In achieving t...
