点击播放陈冠甫朗读片段
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
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 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, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
资产阶级，由于一切生产工具的迅速改进，由于交通的极其便利，一切民族甚至最野蛮的民族都正在文明发展的进程之中。它的商品的低廉价格，是它用来摧毁一切万里长城、征服野蛮人最顽强的仇外心理的重炮。它迫使一切民族——如果它们不想灭亡的话——采用资产阶级的生产方式；它迫使它们在自己那里推行所谓文明，即变成资产者。一句话，它按照自己的面貌为自己创造出一个世界。
资产阶级使农村屈服于城市的统治。它创立了巨大的城市，使城市人口比农村人口大大增加起来，因而使很大一部分居民脱离了农村生活的愚昧状态。正像它使农村从属于城市一样，它使未开化和半开化的国家从属于文明的国家，使农民的民族从属于资产阶级的民族，使东方从属于西方。
资产阶级日甚一日地消灭生产资料、财产和人口的分散状态。它使人口密集起来，使生产资料集中起来，使财产聚集在少数人的手里。由此必然产生的结果就是政治的集中。各自独立的、几乎只有同盟关系的、各有不同利益、不同法律、不同政府、不同关税的各个地区，现在已经结合为一个拥有统一的政府、统一的法律、统一的民族阶级利益和统一的关税的统一的民族。
资产阶级在它的不到一百年的阶级统治中所创造的生产力，比过去一切世代创造的全部生产力还要多，还要大。自然力的征服，机器的采用，化学在工业和农业中的应用，轮船的行驶，铁路的通行，电报的使用，整个整个大陆的开垦，河川的通航，仿佛用法术从地下呼唤出来的大量人口，——过去哪一个世纪料想到在社会劳动里蕴藏有这样的生产力呢？
由此可见，资产阶级赖以形成的生产资料和交换手段，是在封建社会里造成的。在这些生产资料和交换手段发展的一定阶段上，封建社会的生产和交换在其中进行的关系，封建的农业和工场手工业组织，一句话，封建的所有制关系，就不再适应已经发展的生产力了。这种关系已经在阻碍生产而不是促进生产了。它变成了束缚生产的桎梏。它必须被炸毁，它已经被炸毁了。
点击播放薛嘉琪朗读片段
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class.
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 on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. 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 civilisation, 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 so soon as they overcome these fetters, 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 inforced 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.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.
取而代之的是自由竞争以及与自由竞争相适应的社会制度和政治制度、资产阶级的经济统治和政治统治。
现在，我们眼前又进行着类似的运动。资产阶级的生产关系和交换关系，资产阶级的所有制关系，这个曾经仿佛用法术创造了如此庞大的生产资料和交换手段的现代资产阶级社会，现在像一个魔法师一样不能再支配自己用法术呼唤出来的魔鬼了。几十年来的工业和商业的历史，只不过是现代生产力反抗现代生产关系、反抗作为资产阶级及其统治的存在条件的所有制关系的历史。只要指出在周期性的重复中越来越危及整个资产阶级社会生存的商业危机就够了。在商业危机期间，总是不仅有很大一部分制成的产品被毁灭掉，而且有很大一部分已经造成的生产力被毁灭掉。在危机期间，发生一种在过去一切时代看来都好像是荒唐现象的社会瘟疫，即生产过剩的瘟疫。社会突然发现自己回到了一时的野蛮状态；仿佛是一次饥荒、一场普遍的毁灭性战争，使社会失去了全部生活资料；仿佛是工业和商业全被毁灭了，——这是什么缘故呢？因为社会上文明过度，生活资料太多，工业和商业太发达。社会所拥有的生产力已经不能再促进资产阶级文明和资产阶级所有制关系的发展；相反，生产力已经强大到这种关系所不能适应的地步，它已经受到这种关系的阻碍；而它一着手克服这种障碍，就使整个资产阶级社会陷入混乱，就使资产阶级所有制的存在受到威胁。资产阶级的关系已经太狭窄了，再容纳不了它本身所造成的财富了。——资产阶级用什么办法来克服这种危机呢？一方面不得不消灭大量生产力，另一方面夺取新的市场，更加彻底地利用旧的市场。这究竟是怎样的一种办法呢？这不过是资产阶级准备更全面更猛烈的危机的办法，不过是使防止危机的手段越来越少的办法。
资产阶级用来推翻封建制度的武器，现在却对准资产阶级自己了。
但是，资产阶级不仅锻造了置自身于死地的武器；它还产生了将要运用这种武器的人——现代的工人，即无产者。
点击播放教务办陈菲依老师朗读片段
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
随着资产阶级即资本的发展，无产阶级即现代工人阶级也在同一程度上得到发展；现代的工人只有当他们找到工作的时候才能生存，而且只有当他们的劳动增殖资本的时候才能找到工作。这些不得不把自己零星出卖的工人，像其他任何货物一样，也是一种商品，所以他们同样地受到竞争的一切变化、市场的一切波动的影响。
由于推广机器和分工，无产者的劳动已经失去了任何独立的性质，因而对工人也失去了任何吸引力。工人变成了机器的单纯的附属品，要求他做的只是极其简单、极其单调和极容易学会的操作。因此，花在工人身上的费用，几乎只限于维持工人生活和延续工人后代所必需的生活资料。但是，商品的价格，从而劳动的价格，是同它的生产费用相等的。因此，劳动越使人感到厌恶，工资也就越少。不仅如此，机器越推广，分工越细致，劳动量出就越增加，这或者是由于工作时间的延长，或者是由于在一定时间内所要求的劳动的增加，机器运转的加速，等等。
现代工业已经把家长式的师傅的小作坊变成了工业资本家的大工厂。挤在工厂里的工人群众就像士兵一样被组织起来。他们是产业军的普通士兵，受着各级军士和军官的层层监视。他们不仅仅是资产阶级的、资产阶级国家的奴隶，他们每日每时都受机器、受监工、首先是受各个经营工厂的资产者本人的奴役。这种专制制度越是公开地把营利宣布为自己的最终目的，它就越是可鄙、可恨和可恶。
手的操作所要求的技巧和气力越少，换句话说，现代工业越发达，男工也就越受到女工和童工的排挤。对工人阶级来说，性别和年龄的差别再没有什么社会意义了。他们都只是劳动工具，不过因为年龄和性别的不同而需要不同的费用罢了。
当厂主对工人的剥削告一段落，工人领到了用现钱支付的工资的时候，马上就有资产阶级中的另一部分人——房东、小店主、当铺老板等等向他们扑来。
以前的中间等级的下层，即小工业家、小商人和小食利者，手工业者和农民——所有这些阶级都降落到无产阶级的队伍里来了，有的是因为他们的小资本不足以经营大工业，经不起较大的资本家的竞争；有的是因为他们的手艺已经被新的生产方法弄得不值钱了。无产阶级就是这样从居民的所有阶级中得到补充的。
