In what way does the proletarian differ from the manufacturing worker?
[Manufacture here refers to the cottage industry, small scale production – not the massive factories we have today – Editor] A. The manufacturing worker of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries almost everywhere still had the ownership of his instrument of production, his loom, the family spinning wheels, and a little plot of land which he cultivated in his free hours. The proletarian has none of these things. The manufacturing worker lives almost always in the countryside under more or less patriarchal relations with his landlord or employer; the proletarian dwells mostly in large towns, and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal conditions by large-scale industry, loses the property he still owns and in this way himself becomes a proletarian.
