Class Struggle and the Communist Manifesto

Class Struggle and the Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto is profoundly marked by the history of class struggle and social inequality throughout history. In fact Marx suggests that history is in essence merely a timeline of class struggle, unchanging apart from the alteration in mode of production. The document is the story of the conflict between the Proletariat and the Bourgeois, the oppressed and the oppressor, the haves and the have nots, etc? However, this is not a new idea and Marx is really not all that radical. In his Politics, Aristotle wrote, ?Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority?On the other hand, the very poor, who are in the opposite extreme, are too degraded.?[i] As Marx states it in the document, modern history is the manifestation of centuries of a system that was and still is built on the delicate balance of inequities. [ii]

For our purposes we will begin this timeline with the 17th century in Europe. It is a time period marked by a hierarchy of ranks and sub ranks. These positions were hereditary and binding for the duration of someone?s life bar any incredible circumstance. These ranks were also marked specifically by wealth. In this time period serfdom, a system in which peasants worked land that was owned by a wealthy member of the nobility was the standard. The very distinction of classes was what the wealthy had; what they wore, where they lived, and how they lived. The countryside was marked by sets of self-reliant villages with the noble?s manor at the center. [iii] According to Marx serfdom was a step above slavery for the people were laboring but not benefiting...

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...e Communist Party. Transcribed by Allen

Lutins with assistance from Jim Tarzia. Appearing at

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/treatise/communist_manifesto/mancont.htm.

[iii] Sherman, Dennis, and Joyce Salisbury. The West in the World. 2nd ed. Boston,

McGraw Hill Publishing, 2001.

[iv] Landtman, Gunnar page 77.

[v] Hoch, Stephen. Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in

Tambov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

[vi] Hoch, Stephen page 4.

[vii] Ossowski, Stanislav. ?The Marxian Synthesis.? In The Logic of Social

Hierarchies, edited by Edward O. Laumann, Paul M. Siegel, and Robert W. Hodge.

Chicago: Marham Publishing Company, 1970.

[viii] Sherman pages 488-515

[ix] Sherman pages 517-520

[x] Sherman pages 570-582

[xi] Engels webpage