class-consciousness among the proletariat and hurry their historically ordained victory. Eventually, the proletariat erupts into rebellion, casting off the shackles that bound them to the bourgeoisie. They condemn all the bourgeois laws, morality, and religions as facades for bourgeois economic interests. They rend society apart, destroying the most fundamental condition of their own bondage, the institution of private property. All this is the necessary result of the rapacious bourgeois appetite for profit that brought the proletariat into existence and continually diminished his welfare. Thus, the bourgeoisie undermine the conditions of their own existence. As Marx concludes, "What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable" (94). Chapter 1 Analysis: Bourgeois and ProletariansThe Communist Manifesto was first published on the eve of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848. It was meant as a statement of purpose for Marx's newly formed Communist League and its straightforward, even prophetic, tone is that of a man confidently explaining to a confused world the reasons for a tumult that had not yet begun. Why this confidence? The answer to this depends on Marx's deterministic view of history. Marx inherited from Hegel, his philosophical father, the idea of historical progress. Like Hegel, Marx believed that human history unfolds according to a distinct series of historical stages, each necessarily following the other. These stages ultimately lead to a prescribed Utopian endpoint, after which there will be no more change, an end to history. Unlike Hegel, though, Marx thought that these stages could be foretold. This is because there are scientific laws, discoverable by empirical methods, which govern the progress of history. In such a universe, people are but midwifes, facilitating or frustrating the birth of a new historical period, una...
