[Marxism] SACP on xenophobic attacks

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"During the era of the industrial revolution, skilled artisans
were thrown out of work and replaced by industrial factory
workers at lower salaries. Pollution was caused by industrial
exhaust. Life was made more cruel, nasty, brutish and short.
But progress for humanity took place through the industrial
development process."

This is simply appalling nonsense.

^^^
CB: Is the below appalling nonsense , too ? Evidence of early Alzheimer's ? 
Mumblings of non-sentient beings ?


The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. 

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all 
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the 
motley feudal ties that bound man to his ânatural superiorsâ, and has left 
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than 
callous âcash paymentâ. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of 
religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in 
the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into 
exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, 
has set up that single, unconscionable freedom â Free Trade. In one word, for 
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted 
naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. 

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and 
looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the 
priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. 

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has 
reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. 

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of 
vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its 
fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to 
show what manâs activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far 
surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has 
conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and 
crusades. 

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments 
of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole 
relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered 
form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier 
industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted 
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation 
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen 
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, 
are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. 
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at 
last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his 
relations with his kind. 

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the 
bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, 
settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. 

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a 
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the 
great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the 
national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have 
been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new 
industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all 
civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw 
material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose 
products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In 
place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new 
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and 
climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, 
we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. 
And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual 
creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness 
and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous 
national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. 

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by 
the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most 
barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the 
heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it 
forces the barbariansâ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to 
capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the 
bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls 
civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one 
word, it creates a world after its own image. 

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has 
created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared 
with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from 
the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the 
towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the 
civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the 
West. 

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the 
population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated 
population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property 
in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. 
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, 
governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, 
with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one 
frontier, and one customs-tariff. 

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more 
massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations 
together. Subjection of Natureâs forces to man, machinery, application of 
chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric 
telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of 
rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground â what earlier century 
had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of 
social labour? 

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the 
bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain 
stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the 
conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal 
organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal 
relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed 
productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; 
they were burst asunder. 

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and 
political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of 
the bourgeois class. 

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, 
with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that 
has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the 
sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom 
he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry 
and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces 
against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that 
are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is 
enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the 
existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more 
threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, 
but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically 
destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier 
epochs, would have seemed an absurdity â the epidemic of over-production. 
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it 
appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply 
of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and 
why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too 
much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of 
society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of 
bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these 
conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these 
fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the 
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too 
narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get 
over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of 
productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the 
more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way 
for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means 
whereby crises are prevented. 




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