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Essay On Class Struggle In The Communist Manifesto

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In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels believe that a communist revolution is imminent. They believe that history has shaped society into a two class social structure: the Bourgeois and the Proletariats. They use the comparison of the oppressor versus the oppressed. Over time the former class shrank while the latter grew to encompass the wide majority of people, which is vital to a revolution. At the time this all took place it probably was imminent that there would be a revolution as you will find out from reading this paper. Class struggle has been the divide in class all throughout history or “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” as Marx and Engels put it. Throughout history there has been …show more content…

This is very true in France when there was the French Revolution because so many had been suffering in the lower classes, and members of the upper middle class and even some aristocrats joined by their sides. The bourgeois and the proletariats turned into the same problem. In section I “Bourgeois and Proletarians” we learn about how the bourgeois even made doctors and lawyers into paid laborers. The small merchants and business owners could no longer produce enough to keep up with the bourgeois, and therefore, they were pushed into the oppressed class, the proletariats. This became significant because as the bourgeois started improving their machinery and producing more, they did not need skilled labor, and they could hire women and children for a lot less money. With this happening unemployment rose and wages fell, thus putting more people into poverty and starvation. This is similar to what happened in the French Revolution because the oppressed were extremely poor and did not have enough to eat. This caused a want for reform, and therefore, the same could happen between the bourgeois and the proletariats. In other words, the oppressed can only be oppressed for so long before a life or death challenge steps in, and they have to step up to the challenge. With the majority being in the proletariat class, it is evident that a revolution could happen much

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The three main ideas from the Communist Manifesto The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, had little to no influence when it was first published in 1848 for the Communist League. However, soon after Marx and Engel’s other writings on socialism became published it grew in popularity, and was considered a standard text of the time (Brians, 2006). With Marx’s radical ideas, and Engels’ thorough writing, they were able to convey how they were individual of the other socialists of the time and elaborate on their idea socialism and how it would inevitably be achieved. The three main ideas from The Communist Manifesto are class conflict, ephemeral capitalism, and inevitable revolution.

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