Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/139

 132 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY

Feudalism also had its proletariat—serfdom, which enclosed all the germs of the bourgeoisie. Feudal pro- duction also had two antagonistic elements, which were equally designated by the names of good side and bad side of feudalism, without regard being had to the fact that it is always the evil side which finishes by over- coming the good side. It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by constituting the struggle. If at the epoch of the reign of fetidalism the economists, enthusiastic over the virtues of chivalry, the delightful harmony between rights and duties, the patriarchal life of the towns, the prosperous state of domestic industry in the country, of the development of industry organised in corporations, guilds and fellow- ships, in fine of all which constitutes the beautiful side of feudalism, had proposed to themselves the problem of eliminating all which cast a shadow upon this lovely picture—serfdom, privilege, anarchy—what would have been the result? All the elements which constituted the struggle would have been annihilated, and the develop- ment of the bourgeoisie would have been stifled in the germ. They would have set themselves the absurd problem of eliminating history.

When the bourgeoisie had overcome it, it was no longer a question of either the good or the bad side of feudalism. The productive forces which were developed by the bourgeoisie under feudalism had now been ac- quired by the bourgeoisie itself. All the old economic forms, the civil relations corresponding to them, the political state which was the official expression of the old civil society, were all broken down.

Thus, in order to fairly judge feudal production, it is necessary to consider it as a system of production based on antagon:sm, It is necessary to show how wealth was