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Marx, Karl, 1818-1883

"Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte"


The bourgeois social order, which, at the beginning of the century,
placed the State as a sentinel before the newly instituted allotment,
and that manured this with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out
its heart-blood and its very brain, and throws it into the alchemist's
pot of capital. The "Code Napoleon" is now but the codex of execution,
of sheriff's sales and of intensified taxation. To the four million
(children, etc., included) official paupers, vagabonds, criminals and
prostitutes, that France numbers, must be added five million souls who
hover over the precipice of life, and either sojourn in the country
itself, or float with their rags and their children from the country to
the cities, and from the cities back to the country. Accordingly, the
interests of the farmers are no longer, as under Napoleon, in harmony
but in conflict with the interests of the bourgeoisie, i.e., with
capital; they find their natural allies and leaders among the urban
proletariat, whose mission is the overthrow of the bourgeois social
order.


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