The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe: the Manifesto

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe: the Manifesto.

Written in 1847, the Manifesto foresaw even then that capitalism could not survive without finding markets on a global scale.

As early as 1847, Marx and Engels made clear in the Communist Manifesto that capitalism would arrive at globalisation. This itself proves that Marxism is scientific and correct. Let us look at the part of the Communist Manifesto that speaks of the need to find a constantly expanding market.

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.