c. The Ruling Process: In the process of ruling, there occurs a continual consolidation of power within industrialized nations and over non-industrialized ones. Within industrialized nations, “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 population, centralized means of production and has a concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. 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. (CM) Within non-industrialized nations, the bourgeoisie subjugates people and forces them to adopt capitalistic modes of production as a way of guaranteeing sources of raw materials and a market for cheap goods. The social consequences of the rule of the bourgeoisie, according to Marx, are devastating. Everywhere, social relationships revolve around money and self-interest. Personal worth becomes “exchange value,” and freedom becomes “free trade”, while physicians, lawyers, priests, poets, and scientists become merely “paid wage-laborers” and the family relation becomes merely a “money relation.” Meanwhile, commercial crises and competition among the bourgeoisie causes ever-greater insecurity for the workers and their wages always tend toward the minimum necessary for their bare survival.
