Pagina 25 de 88

Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions)

against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the

rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make

provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there

the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The

real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result,

but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is

helped on by the improved means of communication that are created

by modern industry and that place the workers of different

localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact

that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all

of the same character, into one national struggle between

classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And

that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with

their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern

proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.