Carl Chiarenza: Photographs (Born, 1935)

 

Internal 
     Landscapes
               Photo Review, V. 28, No. 4,  2009, pages 2 – 6.
              

Robert Hirsch:  How has your family background shaped your life?

Carl Chiarenza: I was born in Rochester, New York. My parents were immigrants from Italy. During the Great Depression my father could be found in breadlines when he wasn't a laborer for the WPA. He was an amateur neoclassical painter and sometime woodcarver who worked in factories when he could. In the 1930s and 1940s he was a communist. Following that difficult period he supported the family as a cabinetmaker working for companies producing display units. My mother worked as a seamstress in the Rochester clothing industry. Along with art, music of all kinds was big in our house. We listened to popular Italian and American songs and opera every Saturday. My father played the mandolin and played music with relatives on banjos and guitars. My three brothers and I all sang, played musical instruments, and drew. I don't do anything without music.

RH: I've noticed you have music in your studio and darkroom.

CC: Everywhere. I don't work without it. I started playing the clarinet in grammar school and studied with a graduate student at the Eastman School of Music. I played in the school bands and orchestras and sang in the choirs. I paid my way through Rochester Institute of Technology playing jazz (tenor sax and clarinet) with the Johnny Matt Band and working in the local bakery as well as jewelry and photo shops.

RH: How does music affect your picture making?

CC: I struggle to do with pictures what composers do with music — make that indefinable, emotional contact.

RH: How do you utilize music in your work?

CC: For example, while making the images for my book, Solitudes (Lodima Press), I listened over and over to pianist Mitsuko Uchida playing Mozart's sonatas because they put me into a spectacular solitary place, which pervades the studio and hopefully influences the work. And that is continued in the darkroom in the making of prints.

RH: What role did religion play in your upbringing?

CC: My father, like most other Sicilian laborers, was raised as a Catholic. I recently found out my dad was molested by a priest when he was an altar boy in Italy. I suspect that's part of the reason he withdrew from the church and was very much against it — and probably influenced his later interest in Marxism. On the other hand, my mother was a card-carrying Catholic while my father was a card-carrying communist. So, you might say, I had a mixed religious heritage [laughter].

RH: How did this affect your formal spiritual life?

CC: I stopped attending religious instruction when I was about twelve. A priest came to our house to find out why. My father answered the door and the priest noticed three of my father's paintings, all of which have nudes in them. The priest said, "Now I understand why your son is not coming to religious instruction." My father pushed him out the door and said, "Don't ever come back to this house again." I have often been caught saying that most of the problems in the world are caused by organized religion. They preach one thing and do something else. I believe there is something out there that is important as a force. I confess that I don't understand it. I keep searching for it since it certainly motivates me, and my work, but as far as organized religion is concerned, I'm not able to participate.

RH: How did you get interested in photography?

CC: The playground across the street from our house had a meeting and storage shack. The playground director was interested in photography and built a tiny darkroom in that shack. I was about eight years old; I had a Brownie camera and made my first pictures of neighborhood kids playing ball. Once I developed film in our second floor bathroom. I put the film tank in the bathroom sink to wash. I set the water at a trickle and went to the playground. When I returned water had flooded through the ceiling and into the first floor, almost ending my photographic career before it began. In high school I took a course on photography, was the newspaper and yearbook photographer, and built a darkroom in our attic, which was a perfect dream.

My father's brother built my first enlarger out of wood and an old camera. He also got me a 3-1⁄4" x 4-1⁄4" Speed Graphic camera, which I used throughout high school. My first serious picture was from a wall in one of the towers of East High School on graduation day 1953. People scribbled their names on that wall over the years. It was essentially my first abstract picture.

RH: Why did you go to the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)?

CC: I went to RIT because I was passionate about photography. I had no idea of becoming a photo artist. In my mind going to RIT for two years would lead to a good job at Kodak. At the end of the second year, Ralph Hattersley formed a new Bachelor of Fine Art program in photography, which enticed me and such fellow students as Pete Turner, Jerry Uelsmann, Ken Josephson, and Peter Bunnell. Minor White was hired to teach in that program. We had an incredible experience with these two crazy people: Ralph and Minor, who were creatively amazing and complete opposites!

RH: What did you learn from Minor White?

CC: Minor taught me to spend time looking deeply into pictures, from edge to edge. One consequence is that I am very critical of pictures because I see all the parts. He also made it clear we could make photographs with a passion that could be conveyed to others, you could be a poet with imagery or musician with imagery. Minor made me understand I could take my poetic inclinations and musical background and put this into a photograph that was as significant as any other form of expression.

RH: What did Ralph Hattersley teach you?

CC: The way I work today, making pictures out of what is essentially trash, has a great deal to do with Ralph Hattersley. Ralph spent his life stretching people and making them try to understand themselves. And he did it in ways completely opposite from Minor. He would say, "Go in the darkroom and look through the trash nd see if there is something there that you can reconstruct" or "put the print into the wrong chemistry and see what happens." Instead of talking about known structures, like the Zone System, and making beautiful prints, Ralph said, "Screw it up and see what happens." He encouraged us to try something different, while maintaining self-awareness. An emphasis on consciousness was the thing Minor and Ralph shared; yet they pursued it in independent ways.

RH: What motivates your picture making?

CC: I've been making pictures so long it's like eating. It's what I do everyday. I've always been interested in producing something, whether it's imagery, writing, or music, which gives back something of what I took in.

RH: What was the defining moment that guided you into the studio?

CC: In 1979 I was invited to use the new Polaroid 20x24 camera. I had no idea what the hell I was going to do. I wasn't used to bringing things to the camera or working in color. I spent day after day bringing stuff from home trying to make abstract still lifes and I failed. This led me to work at home with 4x5 Polacolor material. I finally came up with an Ansel Adams-style landscape made out of blue pieces of paper. I was making a monochromatic color picture, which made it clear to me I was a black-and-white photographer, not a color photographer. I got excited about being able to make this picture and I started making more landscape pictures at home. I found this approach much more conducive to making my kind of pictures so I stopped going outdoors. I also stopped using the 20"x24" Polaroid camera

[laughter].

RH: How did your notion of the landscape evolve from outside to inside?

CC: Once I stopped photographing outside I was no longer a part of actual nature. I went into the studio and made a series of pictures called Woods, which explored my feelings about nature along with my visual sense about nature in terms of picturing the landscape. I concluded that the idea of landscape is really a pictorial one. The word landscape didn't come into existence until pictures of nature were looked at and labeled landscapes. Previously people didn't refer to landscape out there. It became a landscape out there only after the picture was made. My sense of landscape, therefore, is that it is a pictorial idea that we construct. Along with the heat, the sun, and insects bothering me, nature is really completely apictorial, unruly, often ugly as hell and that's why you have to work so hard to make a photograph out there.

RH: How have photographers created a landscape genre?

CC: Landscape photographers, like painters before them, took from nature and then imposed their presence on it. Ansel Adams excelled at this. Ansel actually "made" Moonrise Over Hernandez, New Mexico in the darkroom. It was his visual idea, which he saw when he looked out into nature; and he knew he could make his vision happen by manipulating the light passing through the negative in the darkroom. Ansel made imaginary pictures based on his feeling about the landscape. It is a two-way street. Humans bring their feelings to the landscape and the landscape in turn affects us. The picture is somewhere in between that, inspiration from the land, which itself is not making pictures or poems or music, but taking that raw material and reconstituting it into the feelings one associates with it.

When I make pictures in the studio, I take scraps of paper, play with them and with the lights directed upon them, and make what I would love to see in nature, but isn't there. I can't see it out there, but I feel it. It is my way of giving back to nature something that I got indirectly from nature.

RH: Why do you work in black-and-white?

CC: I am mildly colorblind, but I really don't think that is the cause. Fundamentally the kind of feeling and emotion I want to convey is best expressed in black-and-white. Color interferes and distracts from my objectives; it doesn't have that depth, that richness, that pulse, or as we would say in music, "that sound."

RH: What is the attraction in your prints to the photographic black?

CC: There is no other medium that has that quality. It slows you down. It forces you to stop and stay in the picture. We don't immediately make associations with the world in a direct way. Black and white connects you directly to your thoughts and feelings by reducing a subject to its essential qualities. It's not only the blacks, but also what happens with the light. It's really about light and the absence of light without the interference of those distracting colors. It's a conundrum.

RH: How do you utilize depth of field and sharpness?

CC: I was trained in the twentieth-century straight photographic tradition and it is a hard thing to buck. It's like a religion — you don't break the rules even though you try. I do break the rules, but primarily by doing the collages — a thing I learned from Hattersley - but, though I will occasionally use planes of relative focus for certain feelings, I still usually stop down to ƒ32 to get as much depth of field as possible.

RH: What is the key factor in your creative process?

CC: I go to work every day I can. The most important thing is just showing up.

RH: How would you describe your working process?

CC: I go into the studio and start with some pieces of paper that I left off with. It's like a writer saying don't go a day without writing a paragraph that you cannot start with the following day. I try to do that. It doesn't always work. Often I go in with nothing. It's really serendipitous. I go in there and I start pushing pieces of paper and other stuff around trying to make a collage. I may go in there with an idea as I did with for the theme books Solitudes or with The Peace Warriors, but normally I don't. Usually I start by moving stuff together and moving the lights around until something begins to develop and that gives me direction.

RH: How do you collect your materials?

CC: I pick up pieces of paper, and other small detritus, all of the time.

Sometimes people send me stuff. I just got a package of wonderful pieces of paper from a calligrapher who saw one of my presentations. A couple of my poker buddies bring me metal trash from their companies. Stuff comes from everywhere — the kitchen, pieces of metal from cans, foil off of wine bottles. I am always looking for new materials; it helps to break out of the ruts we all get into. Send me something!

RH: Are you interested in collage as an independent art form?

CC: Yes, but not for my work. I am interested in experiencing work in all media and how those creative people use their media to move me. I admire work from Braque to Heartfield and Höch to Bearden to Joe Mills, but I have no interest in making collage as collage. My collages, as collages, are not very interesting. They only work as a means to photographs.

RH: How do you reconcile being an artist and making a living?

CC: When I started I never thought about making a living from my photographs, but today young people constantly ask me for advice on how to make it.

When I started, there was no "making it." I made pictures because I had to or wanted to. We all knew that making art with photography would not support us. We all found other ways to pay the rent. I tried journalism, ended up being an art historian. Now that I am retired from that role, I still try to stay with what is important to me, making pictures, and not getting too distracted by galleries, museums, and writing, but it's impossible to avoid, which is why I'm doing this interview with you [laughter].

My problem is not to be taken in by having to get the work out, shown, sold, and having people write about it. But I am human and I succumb. It is easy to lose track of what it is you are doing. Maintaining a balance among these areas is the tough thing to do. Nonetheless I still rarely make a profit at year's end.

RH: What is the connection between Landscapes of the Mind (1988) and your book Evocations (2002)?

CC: Landscapes of the Mind has pictures from the 1950s through 1986. Evocations has pictures from 1987 to 2000. Landscapes contains text and chronologies while Evocations is a poetic picture book (with poetry by Robert Koch) that is more abstract. Together, the two books survey my work, as opposed to three of the new ones which are thematic: The Peace Warriors of 2003 (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Solitudes (Lodima Press, 2005), and Interaction: Verbal/Visual (Nazraeli Press, 2007). The newest book (Pictures Come From Pictures, Selected Photographs 1955–2007, David R. Godine Publisher, Boston, 2008), however, surveys my work from 1955 through 2007 in a thematic form, which conveys recurring themes and forms over the years by juxtaposition or sequence.

RH: How does your book, The Peace Warriors of Two Thousand and Three (Nazraeli Press), differ from your previous ones?

CC: I was working in the studio listening to National Public Radio News about the war in Iraq and realized I was making a collage that looked like a warrior. I made pictures in the past called Don Quixote and Samurai. Since high school I have been attracted to the character Cervantes developed. Early in 2003 I made this one picture, and for the rest of the year I pursued the warrior idea, which is completely alien to the way I usually work. Although this work is certainly not social documentary, it is somehow connected to Iraq. These pictures are my response to the madness of the world. The samurai is one kind of warrior and Don Quixote is another kind of warrior; perhaps they are opposing each other. "Peace Warrior" is an oxymoron — but a meaningful one.

RH: How did Aaron Siskind affect your abstract photographic thinking?

CC: I was studying with Minor White and moving in the abstract direction before I met Siskind or saw his work.Around 1956 or 1957 Hattersley took our class to Chicago to meet Siskind Tenaya 265, 1991 and Harry Callahan at the Institute of Design. I was already interested in abstraction and its development in American art. I responded very positively to Siskind and his work. For me Aaron was a mensch, an honorable, down-to-earth man of integrity who could speak directly about issues without giving you a load of bullshit. We could talk and talk. He and his work gave me positive reinforcement for my direction. I loved the guy.

RH: How did Siskind's way of navigating the world affect you?

CC: Siskind had a great mind, was very conscious of the world, and was both a poet and an activist. Critics say his work, after he turned away from social documentary, had nothing to do with life and that his pictures did not help change the world. His mature work was not political in the sense of a direct response to immediate world events. It was about basic human conditions. Aaron's direct activism was done silently and quietly as a human being, not as a picture maker. That had a profound influence on me. He also protected me from hubris, from becoming artificial, arrogant, and prideful.

RH: How does this play in an era where photographers are expected to champion a cause?

CC: Photography has a spread of possibilities far greater than any other medium. There have been photographers who have made amazing social documentary "pictures" that have been useful in changing society, but there are many ways of dealing with human beings and they're all important. It's not just the public disasters and man's physical (visible) inhumanity to man that need attention. There is another side to this story about humanity, dealing with love and friendship, with emotions and with invisible wounds, which we ought to be sharing. We need great picture makers in all aspects of photographic picture making.

One of the things that led Aaron to shift to abstraction, which I have written about (Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors, 1982) was that he felt his social documentary photography only affected the people already on that side of the arc.

I try to lead my life in terms of being helpful to the problems of the world by doing things quietly and privately, as Aaron did. My art is about something else, another "cause" that I feel is particularly important in our time. I am for everybody doing what he or she can do, the best way she or he can do it. If we don't have that balance, the world will be a sad place indeed.

This article is the result of numerous 
conversations and emails from June 2004 to January 2009.
 © Robert Hirsch 2009.

Paul Klee (18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940)

Ad Marginem

   The Shock 
           of the New

Transcendentalism was the common interest of the painters who formed the Expressionist group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1910. It was also a deep-set part of Bauhaus thought and practice, for nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that the Bauhaus represented some kind of logic opposed to the world-transforming aspirations of Expressionism. When Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus, so did a Swiss artist named Paul Klee. And though Klee was not a Theosophist he was, like Kandinsky, devoted to an ideal of painting that stemmed from German idealist metaphysics. "The monument of Klee's obsession with this metaphysics was a singular book, The Thinking Eye, written during his teaching years at the Bauhaus - one of the most detailed manuals on the "science" of design ever written, conceived in terms of an all embracing theory of visual "equivalents" for spiritual states which, in its knotty elaboration, rivalled Kandinsky's. Klee tended to see the world as a model, a kind of orrery run up by the cosmic clockmaker - a Swiss God - to demonstrate spiritual truth. This helps account for the toylike character of his fantasies; if the world had no final reality, it could be represented with the freest, most schematic wit, and this Klee set out to do. Hence his reputation as a petit-maître. "Like Kandinsky, Klee valued the "primitive," and especially the art of children. He envied their polymorphous freedom to create signs, and respected their innocence and directness. 'Do not laugh, reader! Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us ....' In his desire to paint 'as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe,' Klee was a complete European. His work ferreted around in innumerable crannies of culture, bringing back small trophies and emblems from botany, astronomy, physics, and psychology. Music had a special influence on him. He believed that eighteenth-century counterpoint (his favourite form) could be translated quite directly into gradations of colour and value, repetitions and changes of motif; his compositions of stacked forms, fanned out like decks of cards or colour swatches, are attempts to freeze time in a static composition, to give visual motifs the "unfolding" quality of aural ones - and this sense of rhythmic disclosure, repetition, and blossoming transferred itself, quite naturally, to Klee's images of plants and flowers. He was the compleat Romantic, hearing the Weltgeist in every puff of wind, reverent before nature but careful to stylize it. Klee's assumptions were unabashedly transcendentalist. 'Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth,' he wrote in 1920, 'things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities ...'

Eros

     "Klee's career was a search for the symbols and metaphors that would make this belief visible. More than any other painter outside the Surrealist movement (with which his work had many affinities - its interest in dreams, in primitive art, in myth, and cultural incongruity), he refused to draw hard distinctions between art and writing. Indeed, many of his paintings are a form of writing: they pullulate with signs, arrows, floating letters, misplaced directions, commas, and clefs; their code for any object, from the veins of a leaf to the grid pattern of Tunisian irrigation ditches, makes no attempt at sensuous description, but instead declares itself to be a purely mental image, a hieroglyph existing in emblematic space. So most of the time Klee could get away with a shorthand organization that skimped the spatial grandeur of high French modernism while retaining its unforced delicacy of mood. Klee's work did not offer the intense feelings of Picasso's, or the formal mastery of Matisse's. The spidery, exact line, crawling and scratching around the edges of his fantasy, works in a small compass of post-Cubist overlaps, transparencies, and figure- field play-offs. In fact, most of Klee's ideas about pictorial space came out of Robert Delaunay's work, especially the Windows. The paper, hospitable to every felicitous accident of blot and puddle in the watercolour washes, contains the images gently. As the art historian Robert Rosenblum has said, 'Klee's particular genius [was] to be able to take any number of the principal Romantic motifs and ambitions that, by the early twentieth century, had often swollen into grotesquely Wagnerian dimensions, and translate them into a language appropriate to the diminutive scale of a child's enchanted world.'

Ad Parnassus

     "If Klee was not one of the great formgivers, he was still ambitious. Like a miniaturist, he wanted to render nature permeable, in the most exact way, to the language of style - and this meant not only close but ecstatic observation of the natural world, embracing the Romantic extremes of the near and the far, the close-up detail and the "cosmic" landscape. At one end, the moon and mountains, the stand of jagged dark pines, the flat mirroring seas laid in a mosaic of washes; at the other, a swarm of little graphic inventions, crystalline or squirming, that could only have been made in the age of high-resolution microscopy and the close-up photograph. There was a clear link between some of Klee's plant motifs and the images of plankton, diatoms, seeds, and micro-organisms that German scientific photographers were making at the same time. In such paintings, Klee tried to give back to art a symbol that must have seemed lost forever in the nightmarish violence of World War I and the social unrest that followed. This was the Paradise-Garden, one of the central images of religious romanticism - the metaphor of Creation itself, with all species growing peaceably together under the eye of natural (or divine) order." 


            

Excerpt 

from Robert Hughes, 

"The Shock of the New"

Gallery

Sea Snail King

The Gate in the Garden               

The Comedian

Virgin in a Tree

         

Aged Phoenix

Hero with the Wing

   
             

                 

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels : The Communist Manifesto (1848)

I. Bourgeois and     

            Proletarians 

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with clash antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms: Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

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.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. And in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

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.

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.

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.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.