The Middle And Working Class Manifesto

The “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was written by Marx and Engels as the Communist . speech Marx examines the movement of the working class manifested in the . middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political.
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While defining class, Marx started with "The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers", and "determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element, upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves. In other words, classes are defined in terms of the exploitative relations of production which constitute the society in question. These relations of production depend, according to Marx, on the distribution of the means of production.

He states that the capitalist mode of production, "produces not merely the material products, but reproduces continually the production relations in which former are produced, and thereby also the corresponding distribution relations They imbue the conditions of production themselves and their representatives with a specific social quality! It follows from the aforesaid analysis that the class position of an individual depends on his or her relationship to the means of production. Class thus conceived is objective ; it is formed within the relations of production, and does not arise from individual's consciousness.

Moreover, for Marx, class is a social relationship. According to Marxian analysis class is thus a reflection of the exploitation in a social structure -- who exploits whom. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society Engels, however, in his book devoted himself to the investigation into the condition of the industrial proletariat in England as it was in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century.

But development of industry and that of the working class did not stop in the mid-nineteenth century. In the Communist Manifesto Marx wrote, "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionalising the instruments of production, and thereby the relation of production and with them the whole relations of society.

Part III, volume one. While stating that "Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material reactions between himself and nature", Marx points out that "The elementary factors of the labour process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.

Marx thus comes to the conclusion that,. He makes use of the mechanical, physical and chemical properties of some substance in order to make other substances subservient to his aims.


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These instruments of labour occupy a very important place in Marxian economy and sociology in understanding different forms of economic activity. Marx refers to Franklin who defined man as a tool making animal as distinct from other animals. Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in and his classic work Capital came out in the sixties of the nineteenth century. What distinguishes the present economic epoch, when the world is celebrating the completion of years of the publication of Communist Manifesto from the economic epoch of Marx's time?

The vast accumulation of capital and its expansion has also resulted in vast expansion of the mass of labour-power. Marx in his Capital volume one defines this expansion of the mass of labour power as "reproduction of a mass of labour-power, which must necessarily re-incorporate itself with capital for that capital's self-expansion The vast increase in the mass of working class is accompanied in the present economic epoch with the phenomenon of the ongoing revolution in science and technology in consequence of which instruments of labour has undergone a revolutionary change. The on-going scientific and technological revolution has opened up new vistas of productive forces and changes in the traditional structure of the working class.

With the rise of modern industry as a sequel to the industrial revolution, Karl Marx himself noted, "The varied, apparently unconnected and patrified forms of the industrial process now resolved themselves into so many conscious and systematic applications of natural science to the attainment of given useful effects" These words were said by Marx in just at the time when the industrial revolution was showing signs of the potential role of science in production.

But these were really prophetic.

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The industrial revolution was marked by specific innovation by individual scientists. Thus the steam engine was the prime mover of the industrial revolution. In contrast, no single innovation in contemporary times occupies the same position. On the basis of this objective analysis Harry Braverman, himself an industrial worker and an eminent Marxist scholar, who made an indepth study of Marx's labour-process concludes, "The scientific technical revolution, for this reason, cannot be understood in terms of specific innovations Already the rise of monopoly capital and the vast expansion of administrative work created a huge stratum of clerical workers.

Now among other ramifications, STR has led to the development of an immensely big service sector engaging highly skilled labour, technician, computer operators and other workers with specialised knowledge. Every country is now witnessing the phenomenal growth of the service sector along with the rapidly growing number of the service sector workers.

This holds good for India too. The service sector employees or workers, trade unionised under the big national federations, have occupied a very important position in the trade union movement of the country. But very often the question is raised whether this service sector is productive or not.

If not productive then what role the employees and workers of this sector can play in the continuing and sharpening class struggle of the capitalist society. Before proceeding with the discussion on this topic we may again revert to Marx to see whether Marx in his life time could throw any light on it.


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Who are they and what is their role in creating surplus value. Marx pointed out, "The clearly defined division of labour in a commercial office, in which one keeps the books, another looks after money matters, a third travels etc. In the second place, the value of his labour power, and thus his wages, are determined as those of other wage-workers , i. Here Marx makes two specific points very distinctly. But during the on-going discussion on the character and role of the commercial wage-workers or service workers, this clear Marxist analysis is very often missed. Marx did not stop here.

Marx further clarifies, "we must make the same distinction between him commercial wage-workers and the wage-workers directly employed by industrial capital which exists between industrial capital and merchants' capital But Marx's line of argument is cogent. In other words, commercial wage-labour also creates surplus value in a different way.

That this surplus value, the merchant appropriates to himself, through unpaid labour of this clerk is made more clear by Marx when he explains,"The mass of the individual merchant's profits depend on the mass of capital that he can apply in this process, and he can apply so much more of it in buying and selling, the more the unpaid labour to his clerks. The unpaid labour of these clerks, while it does not create surplus value, enables him to appropriate surplus-value, which, in effect, amounts to the same thing with respect to his capital.

Further, "Just as the labourers' unpaid labour directly creates surplus value for productive capital, so the unpaid labour of the commercial wage-worker secures a share of this surplus value for merchant's capital" Marx very clearly analysed the functions of the commercial clerks as commercial wage-workers producing surplus value for merchant's capital in a way different from that of the industrial wage- worker. Is commercial labour like industrial labour productive? The usual notion is that it is not, i. What he costs the capitalist and what he brings in for him, are two different things.

But from which stratum of the society are these commercial wage labourers recruited? Moreover, this increases supply, and hence competition. With few exceptions, the labour-power of these is therefore, devalued with the progress of capitalist production. To the merchant they appear as a source of his profit, proportional, given the general rate of profit, to their size. Since the days of Marx, things have changed enormously and as has been pointed out, the technological revolution has also led to a revolutionary change in the labour process.

For the present generation of Marxists this change has to be properly understood and things are to be judged and examined in the light of the basic formulations of Marx and Engels. The working class has always had to undergo a particular pattern of labour-process depending upon the structure of capitalist accumulation and technological developments of the instruments of labour. In Marx's day a huge number of wage-labourers belonged to the domestic industry. A vast amount of capitalist enterprise was organised on the basis of manual rather than steam-power technologies.

In fact, Machinofacture was generalised, not during the period of the Industrial Revolution itself, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the development, especially in the United States, of mass assembly-line production.

The Communist Manifesto - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat

Rather, this structure and composition had changed as the needs of capital accumulation have altered. The working class itself participates in this process as some are destroyed and others created.

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