To understand the full meaning of the given passage, one must comprehend the historical and intellectual context in which it appears. Basically, Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto has depicted human history as a continuous manifestation of class struggles between an oppressor minority and the oppressed majority. Before the advent of the industrial age, all oppressive power was vested in the hands of a feudal class – the aristocracy. The chain of events starting with the overthrow of the monarchy in the French revolution eroded the traditional power base of Europe, leading to the rise of a new class of oppressors among the serfs – the bourgeoisie. This class of men only spoke the language of money and had little use for traditional values such as workmanship, chivalry, religion, family relationships and other forms of sentimentality. The proletariat – the labor class, then crowded to fill the ranks of the new oppressed majority, allowing their hard work to be exploited by the bourgeois capitalists for a bare minimum existence. Marx and Engels believed that through this exploitative association with the proletariat, the bourgeoisie was able to rise to the top of the social class pyramid, fostering the development of present day property relations which sit at the heart of a wealth-driven society. According to this theory, the onset of the 19 th century saw the dawn of a new civilization in which all productive forces of society were being systematically channelized to secure the existence of bourgeois property. Consequently, the proletarians had little choice but to understand their place in the new hierarchy which thrived on their usefulness as workmen, but cared little for their welfare as human beings. Marx and Engels argued that such an exploitative arrangement could not last forever and in due course, discontent would rise to the surface, which would ultimately, force the labor class to rise in armed rebellion against an uncaring, bourgeois ruling class. The study passage serves to illustrate such an outcome. The first section states that: The productive forces of society no longer tend to further the development of bourgeois civilization and the condition of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. (Marxists Internet Archive, 2011). Since, discontent was growing heavily, Marx and Engles have tried to predict it would be only a matter of time before the bourgeoisie realized that their financial stranglehold on the proletariat was not strong enough to permanently secure their wealth due to the uneven nature of exploitation. Sooner or later, the ambitions of the proletariat would break the glass ceiling that until now, kept them down. To further assess the proletariat’s vulnerabilities, the passage looks into how the bourgeoisie desires to tackle this problem: And how does the bourgeoisie get over this crises? On the one hand, by the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other hand, 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. (Marxists Internet Archive, 2011). In association wi