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“This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock companies.” [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]

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“Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830).” [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.]

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A reference to the movement for a reform of the electoral law which, under the pressure of the working class, was passed by the British House of Commons in 1831 and finally endorsed by the House of Lords in June, 1832. The reform was directed against monopoly rule of the landed and finance aristocracy and opened the way to Parliament for the representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. Neither workers nor the petty-bourgeois were allowed electoral rights, despite assurances they would. VOTER FRAUD PERPETRATED BY THE MONIED ELITE? NO WAY

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“ This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords.” [Engels, 1890 German edition]

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“Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild.” [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

A journeyman in the Middle Ages was someone who had completed apprenticeship and become educated about their craft, but not yet a guild-master.

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“ That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan’s (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes.”[Engels, 1888 English Edition]

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By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.

[Engels, 1888 English edition]

The main distinction remains in who owns the means of production. Marx and Engels see history as a struggle to own private property (means of production, not personal property i.e. a toothbrush, or clothing) In the system of capitalism, the bourgeois maintains power by owning the means of production, and the proletarians are vulnerable due to their reliance on the means of production, owned by the bourgeois, to survive.

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