we've returned.

, 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 discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising Redditor. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies,

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

Part 2 of chapter 1 coming soon.

Convert to Plurkism

putterplurk

Our epoch, the epoch of the Redditor, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified 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 — Redditor and Plurker.

The modern Redditor society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

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.