With the growth of industrialization and expansion of male suffrage, mass parties and political groups came to power in each major European nation that radically changed how people thought about 19th century developing society. The Communist League, a revolutionary socialist party, asked Karl Marx, a prominent figure in their organization, to author a manifesto of their principles with the assistance of another key member, Friedrich Engels. Together, they penned a proclamation of their beliefs against class division/struggle and capitalism, and stirred revolutionary passions for the proletariat uprising, The Communist Manifesto. However, Marx and Engels do credit the bourgeoisie, the wealthy, materialistic middle class which they otherwise opposed, as having played an instrumental role in progressing human history. Their unique creation of the capitalist mode of production unintentionally made possible the rise of a socialist society, which Marx and Engels hoped the proletariat would exploit, by using their sheer numbers and physical force to take down the ruling class.
According to Marx, the world has always suffered from the plights of the “oppressor v.s the oppressed,” the ruler vs the commoner, to sum up, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx). When the bourgeoisie came to dominate the economical structure, they built the capitalist mode of production on a similar foundation, just with new titles and ways to keep the masses subdued, ultimately polarizing the classes into two: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In the past, production was reliant on the industry of guilds and the ‘individual’ laborer during the times of feudalism. The means of production and its instruments “land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool- were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker… they belonged as a rule to the producer himself” (Engels). The artisan could take pride in the quality of his product, and was only indebted to the merchant who sold the raw materials, the lord who he owed taxes and rent, and the services of the customer. The cycle was simple, though still at times difficult to work within, however, “the apprentices and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves” (Engels). However, the rise of the Bourgeoisie reworked the system, so that all were indebted to the capitalists.
The bourgeoisie established private property and the capitalist mode of production with two unique, essential qualities: social production, and the worker as a commodity. The feudal system could no longer support the demands of industry and of the power-hungry bourgeoisie, which had been “… monopolised by closed guilds… The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop….Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeoisie” (Marx). From the end of feudalism, and the world of the individual, came the birth of a ‘socialized’ production. The tools of the artisan were transformed to be the tools of hive-minded workers, and modern machinery tore apart the creativity and the quality guilds had treasured, as such, “ …production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the production from individual to social products” (Engels). The product was no longer the product of one worker, but of the factory owner selling ‘his’ wares. The capitalists, a tiny population compared to the masses of former peasants and serfs, appropriated the commodities, the means of production, and the labor of others. The exploited laborer was just part of the machinery, and such, their wages were only enough to live on, so “…that even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes” (Engels). The working class’ jobs and pay fluctuated with the market, and was not reliant on their time or effort, but on the determined ‘minimum’ needed for survival. For the capitalist bourgeoisie, though none of the product is their own, the property and profit it generates fuels their power. However, there was one product of their own creation, that would ultimately be their downfall.
As Marx had stated in The Communist Manifesto, the bourgeois have always played a “most revolutionary part.” To them, the world is something to be molded, the people into modes of production, the products into the profits, the profits into property, and so on. In turn, the bourgeoisie “…is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange. Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of the that class” (Marx). For instance, the French revolution, a battle of the ‘working’ class against the ‘idle’ class, was triumphed by the 3rd estate, but “…soon revealed itself as exclusively the victory of a smaller part of this “estate”, as the conquest of political power by the socially privileged section of it – i.e., the propertied bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church, confiscated and afterwards put up for sale, and partly by frauds upon the nation by means of army contracts” (Engels). This revolutionary fervor was the same used to uproot the feudal system, lifting the bourgeoisie from the role of the oppressed to the oppressor, simultaneously putting an end to all “patriarchal, idyllic relations” (Marx). Society was no longer motivated by natural ‘superiority’ over one another (as it was from lord to vassal or the church over the layman), but by capital (money), and free trade benefiting those who could work the system. Additionally, the bourgeoisie expanded their European markets globally, and pushed for the invention of industrial machinery that progressed capitalism forward. The revolution in politics and industry had always been a revolution of the bourgeoisie, therefore, the bourgeois can’t survive without their revolutionary nature. In that case, the proletariat revolution is one the bourgeoisie inadvertently created and should have expected. By ‘revolutionizing’ the peasantry of the feudal era into a working industrial class, they established new opportunities for the oppressed to rise over the oppressor once again, and, as Marx prophosizes, do away with class division all together. The way they destroyed feudalism, will be the way the proletariat rise against their makers.
Indeed, the bourgeoisie had unintentionally provided the tools and measures to the proletariat for a great revolution. The bourgeoisie has always found itself “…. involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie” (Marx). By educating the proletariat, for help in times of revolution against the nobility but also to push back against foreign competition (i.e governmental jobs like railroad conductors, clerks etc.), the bourgeoisie gave them the ability to direct not only their physical prowess but their mental capabilities. Newfound literacy and educated thought aided the organization of these underground revolutionary parties like the socialists. For the proletariat, the creation of a socialist state is entirely possible, because they have nothing to lose by fighting the bourgeoisie. They cannot lose their property, because they never had any to begin with, nor can they lose their families or religion, because the bourgeois have devalued their meaning to be symbolic of capitalistic gain, as described by Marx in his manifesto, “The bourgeois have torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Even national character and morality have been washed clean of their true purpose, for everything the proletariat does is to serve the bourgeoisie. Engels believes his time, more than ever, was the time for revolution. Revolution is only attainable at a certain stage in history, “… this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here “ (Engels).
Engels states in his pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, “…the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process – i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.” One of these processes is that of negation, whereas capitalism is founded on the principle of private property, yet generates a class with no property. The product (the proletariat) of capitalism will be its negation. The bourgeoisie, a revolutionary class in their way of capitalist mode of production and political upheaval, were, as Marx and Engels describe, the creators of their own downfall. And as Marx states, the communists will be the organization to stir up the insurrection and guide the rebellion.