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Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie

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

present, but their future interests, they desert their own

standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.