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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.
The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of
Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential
product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the
shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the
bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions
of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but
conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to
roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are
revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending
transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their
The Communist Manifesto |
