What did Marx and Engels believe would be the outcome of the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?

Karl Marx (1818–83) was born in Germany into an assimilated Jewish family. As a brilliant young university student, he trained in philosophy and was greatly influenced by the thinking of the German philosopher, Hegel, who had developed a philosophy of history. He met Frederick Engels (1820–95), son of a wealthy industrialist, in Paris in 1844 and they became lifelong friends and intellectual partners. During the revolutions which swept Europe in 1848, they prepared the Communist Manifesto, an analysis of the emergence of industrial capitalism, a program for its overthrow and a plan for its replacement by a communist society in which the workers owned all enterprises and took over the reins of government. During the 20th century, these ideas became the basis for communist revolutions and states from Russia to Cuba.

Marx and Engels were early critics of the effects of the modern factory system, predicting its end as the workers rose up and took control of a system which exploited them so badly and treated them as appendages to machines.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels describe the emergence of a new industrial society and the unequal relationships between its different social classes. This inequality, they believed, would breed hostility between two most important classes, the ruling or bourgeois class, which owned the ‘means of production’, and the working class or proletarians, who were worked to the bone to create the wealth of the bourgeoisie.

[T]he modern working class … [is] a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work … These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him …

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates in the industrial army they are placed under the command of the perfect hierarchy of officers and sargeants … They are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and more embittering it is …

But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels its strength more … The unceasing improvement of machinery, every more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious … Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts …

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact which was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes … [This will then turn into a] more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution …

[T]he Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things … Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1848 (1973). ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party.’ Pp. 62–98 in Karl Marx, Political Writings: The Revolutions of 1848, edited by David Fernback. Harmondsworth UK: Penguin. pp. 73–74, 75–76, 78, 98. || Amazon || WorldCat

Learning Objectives

Relate Marx’s concept of class to his view of historical change

Marx, one of the principle architects of modern social science, believed that history was made of up stages driven by class conflict. Famously, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. ” Class struggle pushed society from one stage to the next, in a dialectical process. In each stage, an ownership class controls the means of production while a lower class provides labor for production. The two classes come into conflict and that conflict leads to social change. For example, in the feudal stage, feudal lords owned the land used to produce agricultural goods, while serfs provided the labor to plant, raise, and harvest crops. When the serfs rose up and overthrew the feudal lords, the feudal stage ended and ushered in a new stage: capitalism.

According to Marx, the way society is organized depends on the current means of production and who owns them. The means of production include things that are necessary to produce material goods, such as land and natural resources. They also include technology, such as tools or machines, that people use to produce things. The means of production in any given society may change as technology advances. In feudal society, means of production might have included simple tools like a shovel and hoe. Today, the means of production include advanced technology, such as microchips and robots.

At different stages in history, different groups have controlled the means of production. In feudal times, feudal lords owned the land and tools used for production. Today, large corporations own many of the means of production. Different stages have different relations of production, or different forms of social relationships that people must enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Throughout history, the relations of production have taken a variety of forms—slavery, feudalism, capitalism—in which employees enter into a contract with an employer to provide labor in exchange for a wage.

Together, the means of production and the relations of production compose a particular period’s mode of production. Marx distinguished different historical eras in terms of their different modes of production. He believed that the mode of production was the defining element of any period in history, and he called this economic structure the base of that society. By contrast, he believed that the ideas and culture of a given stage were derived from the mode of production. He referred to ideas and culture as the “superstructure,” which grew up from the more fundamental economic “base. ” Because of his focus on the economic base over culture and ideas, Marx is often referred to as an economic determinist.

In Marx’s dialectic, the class conflict in each stage necessarily leads to the development of the next stage.

Marx was less interested in explaining the stable organization of any given historical stage than in explaining how society changed from one stage to the next. Marx believed that the class conflict present in any stage would necessarily lead to class struggle and, eventually, to the end of that stage and the beginning of the next. Feudalism ended with class struggle between serfs and lords, and gave rise to a new stage, capitalism.

Marx’s work focused largely on explaining the inherent instabilities present in capitalism and predicting its eventual fall and transition to socialism. Marx argued that capitalism was unstable and prone to periodic crises. Marx believed that economic growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises as capitalism went through cycles of growth, collapse, and more growth. Moreover, he believed that in the long-term this process would necessarily enrich and empower the capitalist class, while at the same time it would impoverish the poorer laboring class, which he referred to as the proletariat.

Eventually, the proletariat would become class conscious—aware that their seemingly individual problems were created by an economic system that disadvantaged all those who did not own the means of production. Once the proletariat developed a class consciousness, Marx believed, they would rise up and seize the means of production, overthrowing the capitalist mode of production, and bringing about a socialist society. Marx believed that the socialist system established after the proletariat revolution would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, abolish the exploitative capitalist, ending their exclusive ownership of the means of production, and introduce a system of production less vulnerable to cyclical crises. For Marx, this eventual uprising was inevitable, given the inherent structural contradictions in capitalism and the inevitability of class conflict.

Marx’s Communist Manifesto Illustrated by Cartoons: The Communist Manifesto gives an overview of Marx’s theory of class conflict and embraces his position that sociologists should also be publicly active social critics. In this video, the test of the manifesto is illustrated with cartoon clips that demonstrate the deep and enduring legacy of Marx’s philosophy for modern culture.

Key Points

Marx sees society evolving through stages. He focuses on dialectical class conflict to control the means of production as the driving force behind social evolution.
According to Marx, society evolves through different modes of production in which the upper class controls the means of production and the lower class is forced to provide labor.
In Marx’s dialectic, the class conflict in each stage necessarily leads to the development of the next stage (for example, feudalism leads to capitalism ).
Marx was especially critical of capitalism and foresaw a communist revolution.
Marx predicted that class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would lead to capitalism’s downfall.
According to Marx, under capitalism, workers (the proletariat) must alienate their labor.
The bourgeoisie try to preserve capitalism by promoting ideologies and false consciousness that keep workers from revolting.
Marx’s understanding of history is called historical materialism because it focuses on history and material (versus ideas).

Key Terms

bourgeoisie: The capitalist class.
proletariat: the working class or lower class
false consciousness: A faulty understanding of the true character of social processes due to ideology.
dialectical: Of, relating to, or of the nature of logical argumentation.