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 bourgeoisie 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 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- 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 civilization, 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 no sooner do they overcome these fetters than
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.