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But with the development of industry the proletariat not only

increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses,

its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various

interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the

proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as

machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly

everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing

competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial

crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The

unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing,

makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions

between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and

more the character of collisions between two classes.