The material forces of production press upon the limits imposed upon them by the laws of private property. This happens, too, because the working class must reduce its consumption of goods to a minimum in consequence of the existing laws of property, which give to capital the right of distribution. All these conditions taken together, the positive as well as the negative ones, make possible and give rise to the struggles of the workers against the middle class--and so the productive agents rise in rebellion. These struggles lead to the organisation of the workers in trade unions, to the awakening of class consciousness, and, as a result, to the formation of the political labour party. (2) The movements within middle-class society, as well as in feudal and ancient society, where freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guild-master and journeyman, capitalist and working man stood and stand in constant antagonism to one another, prove that the whole history of mankind since the rise of private ownership is the history of class struggles, and that in these class struggles, carried on now openly, now under the surface, either new forms of society and of ownership, new economic systems arise or else end with the common destruction of the two classes. The antagonistic classes are supporters of conflicting economic interests, systems of ownership and ideals of culture. The craftsman and tradesman of the towns, the burgher, fought against the feudal lord and knight for individual property, for freedom of industry and trade, for freedom to dispose of personal property and for the national State. With the triumphal progress of the middle class private property fell into fewer and fewer hands. The proletarians are without property, they have no share in the wealth of their country; on the other hand, the production of capital becomes more and more a matter of common co-operation, and capital becomes a joint product. The proletariat can, accordingly, no longer fight for individual ownership but for the socially conducted utilisation of the means of production belonging to the community and of the goods produced. The middle class has therefore created in the proletariat a social class which must have as its object to do away with the middle class system of ownership and to set up the proletarian system of common ownership.