The Struggle for Existence

Front Cover
International School of Social Economy, 1904 - 640 pages

From inside the book

Contents


Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 216 - 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.
Page 459 - The lower strata of the middle class, — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants, — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all...
Page 42 - The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
Page 140 - The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' 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 civilization into their midst, ie to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.
Page 195 - They are not : there is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property ; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.
Page 147 - 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.
Page 601 - European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes — tramps and millionaires.
Page 206 - The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all.
Page 52 - And Cush begat Nimrod : he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Wherefore it is said, even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.
Page 456 - 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.

Bibliographic information