Karl Marx – The Communist Manifesto

1) What is the economic condition of the bourgeoisie? What is the economic condition of the proletariat?


As stated by Karl Marx, there were two main classes, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. “The modern bourgeois society that has grown from the remains of the feudal society, it has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones” (Marx 357). America was the freshest place to open and raise bourgeoisie, there where many factors which played a great role in its economic success. “…The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development” (Marx 357). From here on the markets continue to grow and the modern industry begins to establish a world-market place. The modern working class developed, “…a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market” (Marx 362). They were then pretty much stripped, because they could not even become masters of the productive forces of society and they had nothing they truly owned that they could secure. Their mission then became the destruction of all previous securities. “The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (Marx 367).

Works Sited

Karl Marx. “The Communist Manifesto” A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus. 7th ed. New York: Bedford St. Martins,2006 pp 353- 377.