Bourgeois and Proletarians

Inspired by Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto.  Rendered in trochaic meter, in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable.

From the feudal manor reigning

Across the face of tiny Europe

Came the merchant and the guildsman

Came the buyer and the seller

Into town and into cities

Into ships sailing westward

Trading spice from ancient Egypt

Trading silk from distant China

Finding new worlds, making money

Ever pushing, ever grabbing

Up every stream and every river

Seizing people from their homelands

Sold as slaves in lands just stolen

Nations wiped out in the process

Cree and Aztec, Inca, Mohawk

Turning all lands into markets

Looting gold and felling forests.

In the path of mighty merchants

Nobles bow and priests reform

Old forms crack, old ways crumble

Revolutions roar and rumble

Cross the face of tiny Europe

Aristocratic heads go rolling

Guildsmen into factory owners

Merchants into bankers grown

With the two-faced cry of “Freedom”

The new rulers take control.

As markets grow so does production

Constant change and innovation

Sailing ships replaced by steamboats

Railroads, telegraphs, computers

In the constant search for profit

Transforming all into their image

They rape the earth and fill the waters

With the wastes from their factories

Until the very air we breathe in

Becomes a grey and choking poison.

But not a penny could they make now

Without the surplus value stolen

From the work of many others.

Into cities poured the millions

Peasants into workers changed

Onto ships, the great migrations

Fleeing from pogrom and famine

Searching for a job of work

Multicolored, many-tongued

But with one relation to production

Owning nothing, living only

On the power of their labor

The market value of their sweat.

From little shops and little farms

Gathered into giant factories

By the score and by the thousands

Sweating through the steam and shouting

A toiling army of production

Building things before unheard of

Trains and planes, electric light bulbs

Miles of cloth and tons of steel

Creating needs before undreamed of

Conceiving hope before unborn.

Thus the owners have created

Forces they cannot control.

Production social, profit private

Bring forth hunger and upheaval

Up and down the system rolling

Boom and bust and bombs and war

Sucking up the blood and blocking

Progress with their lust for more

The owners try to hold back history

Kill the new world as it’s born

With Auschwitz and Hiroshima

Napalm and the neutron bomb.

While the workers fight to realize 

The power of their work and numbers

To end the reign of exploitation

To break the chains of private profit

Create a world of peace and plenty

Of freedom never known before.

The two great social forces

Locked in battle, locked in combat

Rolling through the blood and carnage

For the future of the world. 

Published in Practice, Vol 1. Nos. 2-3 (Fall-Winter 1983)