Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/188

138 revolutionary power; and it was against the bourgeoisie that the Revolution was to be undertaken.

He writes: "The development of industry of which the middle class, without either premeditation or resistance, has become the agent, far from maintaining the workers in the isolated situation of competitors, has brought about their revolutionary solidarity by forcing them to become associates for a common end. Thus the growth of Modern Industry cuts at the very foundations of that system of production and appropriation of the products on which the bourgeoisie depends. The bourgeoisie is manufacturing as its chief product its own grave-diggers. Its ruin and the triumph of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

And again: "The immediate object of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: the organisation of the proletariat as a class, the overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, and the conquest of political power by the proletariat." And here again is a very definite statement: "We have followed the more or less veiled civil war raging within our present society to the point where that war will break out into open revolution, and where by the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie the proletariat will establish its dominion." It is, then, by a violent revolution against the middle class that the working class is to grasp the power and realise Communism. But at the same time it seems to Marx that the signal for the struggle is to come