Question 10: In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave?
Answer: The slave is sold once and for all, the proletarian has to sell himself by the day and by the hour. The slave is the property of one master and for that very reason has a guaranteed subsistence, however wretched it may be. The proletarian is, so to speak, the slave of the entire bourgeois class, not of one master,and therefore has no guaranteed subsistence, since nobody buys his labour if he does not need it. The slave is accounted a thing and not a member of civil society. The proletarian is recognized as a person, as a member of civil society. The slave may, therefore,have a better subsistence than the proletarian but the latter stands at a higher stage of development.The slave frees himself by becoming a proletarian,abolishing from the totality of property relationships only the relationship of slavery. The proletarian can free himself only by abolishing property in general.