Marxist Theory of Social Classes: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat

According to Marx and Engels, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. The oppressor and oppressed standing in constant opposition to one another, in an uninterrupted fight, one that each time ended either in a revolution of society at large or in a common ruin of the contending classes. In earlier times, there were complicated arrangements of society which formed a manifold gradation of social rank. The modern common society that has evolved from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms, but instead has established new classes, new conditions of oppression and new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

The period of bourgeoisie possesses a distinctive feature, one that has simplified the class antagonism and society is splitting up more and more into two hostile classes directly facing each other, the Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. After the discovery of America, the feudal system of industry no longer suffices as the manufacturing systems takes its place. Meanwhile, the markets continue to grow as the demand rises. Stream and machinery revolutionized industrial production and the place of manufacture was taken over by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies known as the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way and has given an immense development to commerce, navigation as well as communication by land. In turn, this development has reacted on the extension of industry and while industry, commerce, navigation and railways extended, the bourgeoisie increased its capital, developed as it pushed every class handed down from the Middle Ages into the background. The modern bourgeoisie is the product of a long course of development of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange. Since the establishment of Modern Industry, the bourgeoisie have conquered the modern representative state. They have played a large part in the revolutionary era. They have resolved personal worth into exchange value and in place of the countless indefensible chartered freedoms and have set up a single unconscionable freedom, known as Free Trade.

The bourgeoisie tore away from the family’s sentimental veil, reducing the family relation to a mere money relation. They cannot prevail without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production as well as the relations of production and with those, the relations of society. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie across the world. It must nestle, settle & establish connections everywhere. During it rule of one hundred years, the bourgeoisie created more massive and productive forces than any preceding generations put together. Over time there arises a crises in the existence of the entire bourgeois society, a large part of the existing as well as previously created productive forces are destroyed, this causes an epidemic of overproduction. Industry and commerce appear to be destroyed as well because there is too much civilization, too many means of substance, too much industry as well as too much commerce. This causes the bourgeois property to become endangered which in turn affects the bourgeois society. Now the working class, also known as the proletarians, 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 must sell themselves as piecemeal are considered a commodity like every other article of commerce and are consequently exposed to all the diversity of competition to all the fluctuations of the market. Masses of laborers are crowded into factories and organized like soldiers. They are slaves of the bourgeois class and State and are enslaved daily and hourly by the machine, the over-looker and most of all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The less the skill and exertion implied in manual labor, the more modern industry becomes developed. There is no longer any distinctive validity for the working class and all are basically considered instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use according to their age and sex. The lower level of the middle class consists of small tradespeople, shopkeepers and retired tradesmen, generally the handicraftsmen and peasants.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development; it’s struggle with the bourgeoisie, where the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the country, but broken up by their mutual competition. At this stage, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but instead, the enemies of their enemies such as the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois and the petty bourgeois. The growing competition among the bourgeois and the current commercial crisis, make the wages of the workers fluctuate more so. The organization of the proletarians into a class and eventually into a political party is continually being upset, once again by the competition between the workers, once again rising up stronger and mightier.

The ruling classes advance in industry and precipitate into the proletariat. In times when the class-struggle approaches the process of dissolution and the old society assumes a violent and glaring character, a small section of the ruling class cuts itself loose and joins the revolutionary class, the strong future class. The lower-middle class; the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan and the peasant all fight against the bourgeoisie so to save the middle class from extinction. The “dangerous class,” also known as the social scum; a rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society may be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; it is more prepared for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue due to its conditions of life and being without property. The worker becomes poorer, the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in power and extent and the worker becomes a cheaper commodity the more goods he creates and the devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things.