Summary: The Communist Manifesto (page 2)

This is one of the essential characteristics of the bourgeoisie: This continual upheaval of production, this constant unsettling of all social conditions [...] distinguishes the bourgeois epoch from all previous ones. All the solid and fixed social relations, with their train of time-honoured beliefs and ideas, dissolve; the newly established relations grow old before they can ossify ¹.

The second remarkable characteristic of bourgeois society is its imperialism: to keep itself going, bourgeois society must constantly conquer new territories. Capitalism must be global, or it cannot survive.

Indeed, new markets, new commercial openings, and new reserves of raw materials or labour must be continually secured:

Driven by the need for ever wider outlets for its products, the bourgeoisie is invading the entire globe. It needs to establish itself everywhere, put everything to use, and forge connections everywhere ².

Why? Without this, economic stagnation would set in, and the capitalist system cannot tolerate stagnation, which inevitably leads to decline or economic collapse. Capitalism can only survive through perpetual growth.

Imperialism, as a necessary consequence of adopting a capitalist economy, exposes the folly of trying to reconcile nationalism with capitalism, as some right-wing movements still do. In fact, capitalism is defined by a certain cosmopolitanism (what we would now call globalisation): By exploiting the world market, the bourgeoisie gives a cosmopolitan character to the production and consumption of all countries. Much to the regret of reactionaries, it has stripped industry of its national basis ³.

This has profound consequences in all areas—not only economically or politically, but also culturally: In place of the former isolation of self-sufficient regions and nations, universal relations are giving rise to a general interdependence of nations; out of the many national and local literatures, a world literature is taking shape ⁴.

One of the problems with this globalisation is that it often takes the form of aggressive imperialism in practice. Colonisation is not the result of a deliberate political decision but an inevitable consequence of adopting a capitalist mode of production.
The French and British colonial empires in Africa are a case in point:

The bourgeoisie drags even the most barbaric nations into the current of civilisation. On pain of death, it forces all nations to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it forces them to introduce into their midst what it calls civilisation, i.e., to become bourgeois. In a word, it fashions a world in its own image ⁵.

On the domestic front, the bourgeoisie has subjected the countryside to the domination of the cities ⁶. Indeed, the creation of factories leads to a rural exodus that depopulates the countryside, as agricultural labourers become factory workers. This phenomenon was not necessarily viewed negatively by Marx, who even saw it as a liberation, as it enabled a significant part of the population to be torn away from the deadening routine of rural life ⁷.

From this analysis, we can understand why society transitioned from feudalism to bourgeois society. The feudal system no longer corresponded to society's stage of economic development. The feudal relations of property hindered production instead of stimulating it. They turned into so many chains. These chains had to be broken. And they were ⁸.

Here we have an example of Marx's materialism: it is not ideas that determine the material conditions of people's lives in a given era; rather, it is economic conditions, that is the stage of material development of a society. A society does not move from feudalism to capitalism because the elites or the majority adopt a new economic theory; instead, people adopt a new idea or theory because economic conditions have changed. In this sense, it is matter that determines the mind, not the other way round. What is concrete, real, and material determines our abstract ideas about reality.

¹ ibid.
² ibid.
³ p.31
⁴ ibid.
⁵ ibid.
⁶ p.32.
⁷ ibid.
⁸ p.33