The Communist Manifesto: I. Bourgeois and Proletarians Summary & Analysis

This passage shows two crucial elements of Marx and Engel’s thinking. Firstly, that people in society can be neatly divided into class according to their economic circumstances. Secondly, that this has always been the case, and all history reflects the antagonism between the oppressor class and the oppressed class.

Each society has its own specific economic structure, but the overall battle is always between the oppressor and the oppressed. Whereas before these battles might have been more complex and less overt, the particular success of the bourgeoisie has brought about a simplification of class. Because the bourgeois are so dominant, they have extinguished every class in their path—all except for the proletariat, which grows larger the more people the bourgeoisie oppresses.

The bourgeoisie’s expansion is directly linked to the widening of trade networks and an increased global market. When business was a more local activity, the class systems were more nuanced, varying from area to area. Increased trade, too, developed financial, communication, and transport infrastructure in order to facilitate easier and bigger profits.

The point Marx and Engels are making is that new systems come about whenever the productive forces become too strong for the status quo. In this instance, greater and wider demand for products led from a more artisanal, local type of work to the manufacturing system, in which production is divided into smaller and more menial tasks.

Marx and Engels are referring to the Industrial Revolution, which saw the rise of machination and factories take production to unprecedented levels. The bourgeoisie developed alongside industrialization—as industry became more like a “giant,” the group of people keeping most of the profit grew smaller. This shift also created the modern working class—the majority of the population that has no choice but to work for the bourgeois.

Government is not a separate entity from the bourgeoisie—it’s one of the ways they exert power over society. This gives them the power to ensure all aspects of society further their aims, through the use of law, education, and authority (for example, the police).

Marx and Engels are generally dismissive of religion, deeming it nothing more than a “veil” that hides the exploitation between oppressor and oppressed. Now that the bourgeoisie is the dominant class in society, this “veil” has been lifted, and nothing is important except for money. This applies both to the bourgeoisie, who seek to accumulate ever-increasing wealth, and the proletariat, whose oppressed position means they have sell their labor in order to make enough money to survive.

Work is no longer meaningful except in terms of its profitability. Even science, for example, is only useful insofar as its innovations can further the bourgeoisie’s profiteering. By reducing all relations to “self-interest and money,” the bourgeoisie has removed the meaning from work—and, by extension, people’s lives.

In order to keep making profit, the bourgeoisie has to look for ways to do things bigger, better and faster. The instruments of production—things like tools, factories and infrastructure—are in a constant process of renewal.  The bourgeoisie capitalist system is based on competition, and even the slightest improvement can give one business the edge over another. Competition also drives the bourgeoisie to conquer markets far and wide, both to maximize profit and to prevent any competitive advantage for someone else.

Instead of individual nations with individual cultures and systems, the bourgeoisie makes this individuality increasingly meaningless and impossible. This creates a precarious connection between nations, with one depending on another for a given material. Here, capitalism is also explicitly linked with desire—it’s changed the way people see themselves, and made them long for bourgeois products.

Marx and Engels use the word “civilization” lightly. They don’t necessarily think capitalism is more civilized, but that it presents itself in that way in order to make its dominance seem logical and inevitable. Because the bourgeoisie is so good at bringing down the costs of its desirable goods, nations face the choice of joining the system or being excluded. Part of the bourgeoisie’s skill is to make exclusion seem like a terrible fate.

The industrialization brought about by the bourgeoisie concentrates jobs in urban environments, where the factories are built. This leads to a move away from agricultural society to an industrial one dependent on larger and larger cities. The inequality doesn’t just play out on a city/country level—it plays out across different countries too. The more “successfully” bourgeois nations dominate those that are yet to catch up, entrenching inequality around the world.

The bourgeoisie doesn’t do away with agriculture—in fact, it doesn’t do with anything that can help turn a profit. Instead, it takes something like agriculture, which used to be a way of life, and makes profit its sole purpose. Agriculture will continue to grow as long as there is more profit to generate—whether or not that’s at the expense of land, animal, or human welfare. Capitalism is undoubtedly productive, but Marx and Engels fundamentally disagree with its motives.

This passage restates that Marx and Engels see history as a series of class struggles. The bourgeoisie grew out of feudal society—or outgrew feudal society, to be more accurate.

The bourgeoisie has become too successful for its own good, and it has laid the foundations for its own destruction. Capitalist bourgeois society is likened to a magician because, seemingly out of nowhere, it has completely changed the world in a way that has never been seen before.

Capitalism is inherently unstable because of its size and the interconnectedness of its different elements; it’s so complex that, when things go wrong, things go very wrong. Furthermore, it’s the first system that’s ever had the problem of “overproducing,” or making too much. When goods are overproduced, they become devalued, catastrophically affecting the whole system involved in their creation and distribution. Those most affected by these crises are those at the bottom of the economic class system—the bourgeoisie are better protected because of their wealth.

Bourgeoisie solutions to crises only make these catastrophes more likely in the long run. Marx and Engels feel that the capitalist model is fatally flawed.

Another crucial element of Marx and Engels’ argument emerges: the success of the bourgeoisie has brought about the existence of the proletariat. The proletariat can loosely defined as “working-class,” but more broadly it includes anyone who is oppressed by the bourgeoisie (and so might include people more traditionally thought of as middle class). According to Marx and Engels, this new proletariat class will bring about the destruction of the bourgeoisie.

In a capitalist system, the proletariat only has one asset: its labor. Members of the proletariat have to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in exchange for a wage—this is their only means of survival in a capitalist system. These workers, then, become like products themselves—they are sellable commodities first, human beings second.

The bourgeoisie has systematically devalued work, making a wage packet its sole aim. Marx and Engels think work should be about more than money—it should enrich individuals in a spiritual rather than financial way and foster a sense of community. The bourgeoisie has streamlined work, breaking it into a series of smaller, low-skilled tasks. This makes the work boring, but serves the bourgeoisie by widening the pool of laborers to choose from (if a task is easy, then more people can perform it).

Marx and Engels’ military metaphor here suggests their belief that the proletariat can become a revolutionary force if properly organized. This, ultimately, will be the fault of the bourgeoisie—by cramming people into factories, they unwittingly give the people the opportunity to form a powerful mass. The other point here is that the industrialization, lack of empathy and driving down of skills built into the capitalist system bring about a rise in child labor.

Capitalism flattens the class system, reducing it to the ultimate conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Anyone not in the bourgeoisie is at risk of falling into the proletariat if bourgeois innovations can render their skills meaningless. The proletariat, then, encompasses anyone who depends upon selling their labor to the bourgeoisie in exchange for a wage.

The proletariat exacts revenge by targeting the most immediately available representation of their suppression—the machinery. By destroying machinery, they destroy the bourgeois-owned “instruments of production” that facilitate the proletariat’s oppression. However, because these are local incidents, the bourgeoisie can handle them easily (by replacing anything that’s broken and firing rebellious workers). In order to truly fight back, the proletariat needs to become more aware of the actual system that enslaves them, and attack that, rather than attacking its symptoms.

Ironically, the bourgeoisie is aware of the proletariat’s strength in numbers but has managed to use it to their advantage to further their own power. It’s this power over the workers that allows the bourgeoisie to coerce them into supporting bourgeois aims. Marx and Engels want that people power to be detached from the bourgeoisie’s exploitation.

Unions help to empower the proletariat by giving them a collective voice. Ultimately, Marx and Engels are arguing for a union across all trades and nations in the form of communism. Because the bourgeoisie cannot produce anything without the collective efforts of the proletariat, the threat to withhold this collective labor allows the proletariat to redress the imbalance of power.

Here, Marx and Engels present further evidence that the increasing network of the bourgeoisie has the unintended consequence of simplifying proletariat organization.

Members of the bourgeoisie try to use politics and education to make the proletariat loyal to them. They play a dangerous game, because in improving the intellectual understanding of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie also make an uprising more likely. Marx and Engels believe that the proletariat will become wise to its oppression and refuse to maintain the status quo.

Marx and Engels expand on their idea of the proletariat. Though it is still mainly comprised of the working class, others fall into it too. According to Marx and Engels, the bourgeoisie that want to join the proletariat are disingenuous—true members of the proletariat have no say over their class position. Marx and Engels also distrust the “conservative” middle class that fears change brought about by both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—these people just want society to stay the same, and so they are not revolutionary.

For Marx and Engels, nothing about the way society is run favors the proletariat. That’s why they are so dismissive of conventional standards of law, morality, and religion—they see these three as being both distractions and tools of oppression used by the bourgeoisie. For example, if a member of the proletariat wanted to sue his or her boss for poor working conditions, the law would always be on the bourgeois’ side, because it’s written, adjudged and enforced by them.

Another key element of Marx and Engels’ argument emerges: because the proletariat is denied any private property, the system that allows for private property has to be destroyed. Private property—meaning anything that one person can claim as their own, be it money, land, or anything else—produces inequality that is fundamentally unfair to the majority of society. Another important point to acknowledge here is that Marx and Engels believe that the rise of the proletariat represents the final and ultimate class struggle. Because it is the uprising of the majority—not a privileged few—it will result in a fairer, equal society, removing the need for class antagonism.

Unless the proletariat rises up, inequality will only become more entrenched over time. To Marx and Engels, there is no compromise—the only solution is the destruction of the bourgeoisie. Crucially, they never really spell out what should happen with those people already members of the bourgeoisie—presumably they become part of the proletariat too.

This passage sums up what Marx and Engels have been arguing in this chapter: the bourgeoisie, by creating the proletariat class, has mistakenly put in place the forces that will bring about its own destruction. Once the proletariat takes charge of its collective power, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie is inevitable.