The concentration of wealth and political power: the Manifesto

The Manifesto speaks clearly about the concentration of wealth and political power.

Let us see what it says.

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 Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers.

What earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? The feudal relations of property were burst asunder, and into their place stepped free competition,

accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.