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The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting

mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here

and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian

revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more

for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at

large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without

property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer

anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern

industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in

England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him

of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion,

are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in

ambush just as many bourgeois interests.