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Political Ideas: Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto

The bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class

  • 3 things to know
  • A2 Unit 2

Overview

How the authors credit the bourgeoisie with overthrowing feudalism, the constant revolutionising of production, the creation of a world market, the reduction of relations to cash payment, and why they treat it as a progressive class in its own time.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

Why do Marx and Engels credit the bourgeoisie with a most revolutionary part in history?

Key term

Explain what the phrase that all that is solid melts into air describes.

Key term

What does the Manifesto say about political centralisation under the bourgeoisie?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Why do Marx and Engels credit the bourgeoisie with a most revolutionary part in history?

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels argue that the bourgeoisie destroyed feudal, patriarchal and idyllic relations and created productive forces greater than all preceding generations together. The praise is genuine, since capitalism is treated as a necessary stage on the road to communism.

  2. 2

    State what the Manifesto says the bourgeoisie has left as the bond between people.

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels write that the bourgeoisie has left no other bond between people than naked self-interest and callous cash payment. Personal worth is resolved into exchange value and every valued freedom into a single unconscionable freedom of trade.

  3. 3

    How do the authors describe the effect of capitalism on traditional callings?

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels argue that the bourgeoisie has stripped of their halo every occupation once looked on with reverence, converting the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet and the man of science into its paid wage labourers. Professional standing is replaced by employment.

  4. 4

    Explain what the phrase that all that is solid melts into air describes.

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels use it to describe the constant revolutionising of production under capitalism, which sweeps away fixed and fast-frozen relations before they can ossify. Everything holy is profaned and people are at last compelled to face their real conditions of life.

  5. 5

    Why does capitalism drive the bourgeoisie across the globe?

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels argue that the need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. Production and consumption are thereby given a cosmopolitan character in every country.

  6. 6

    How does the Manifesto describe what would now be called globalisation?

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels describe old local and national self-sufficiency giving way to universal interdependence, with new industries working up raw material drawn from the remotest zones. Intellectual creations become common property and a world literature arises from the many national ones.

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