Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the
discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an
immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication
by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the
extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce,
navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the
background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the
product of a long course of development, of a series of
revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied
by a corresponding political advance of that class. An
oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an
armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune;
here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany),
there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France),
afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either
the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise
against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great
monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the
establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market,
conquered for itself, in the modern representative State,
exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is
but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie.