What were the immediate consequences of the industrial revolution and of the division of society into bourgeois and proletarians?
A. First, the lower and lower prices of industrial products brought about by machine labour totally destroyed in all countries of the world the old system of manufacture or industry based on manual labour. In this way, all semi-barbarian countries, which had hitherto been more or less strangers to historical development and whose industry had been based on manufacture, were forcibly dragged out of their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities of the English and allowed their own manufacturing workers to be ruined. Countries which had known no progress for thousands of years, for example India, were thoroughly revolutionized, and even China is now on the way to a revolution. We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England today deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year’s time. In this way large-scale industry has brought all the peoples of the earth into contact with each other, has merged all the small local markets into one world m
