Difference Between Bourgeois And Proletariat

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In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels described that the distinction between the bourgeois and the proletariat is the ownership of private property, capital, and the means of production which the proletariat will eventually rise up against the bourgeois to create a system that will seize all the means of production and abolish private property to eliminate the exploitation of the proletariat. The bourgeois and the proletariat come from previous class systems that have been divided by rank. The bourgeois is the upper class in modern society while the proletariat are the lower strata.
According to Marx and Engels, history was filled with class struggles. In ancient Rome, they had, “…patricians, knights, plebeians, [and] …show more content…

This category includes “the lower strata of the middle class – the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on,” (18). In a capitalist society, the proletariat is not considered an individual and he or she is merely an extension of the machine operated which allows the bourgeois to decrease the cost of production because the work is automated and more “repulsive”. According to Marx and Engels, “the essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers (21).” Therefore, in a capitalist society, the existence and exploitation of the proletariat is more essential than the existence of the bourgeois for the system to thrive. However, the poor conditions and wages that the proletariat is subjected to by the bourgeois will at some point be no longer “compatible with society”. As stated in the

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