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Political Ideas: Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto

The exploitation of the working class

  • 3 things to know
  • A2 Unit 2

Overview

Wage labour and the price of labour as the cost of subsistence, the factory organised as an industrial army, the effect of machinery on skill and wages, the extension of exploitation beyond the workplace, and the claim that the worker sinks deeper as industry advances.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Process

How does the Manifesto describe the worker as a commodity?

Process

How does the division of labour affect the worker's skill and wages?

Key term

What does the Manifesto say about the employment of women and children?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Explain what exploitation means in the argument of the Manifesto.

    Model answer

    Exploitation means that workers produce more value than they receive back in wages, and that the difference is appropriated by the owners of capital. The relationship is presented as structural rather than as a matter of any employer's cruelty.

  2. 2

    Why must proletarians sell their labour power?

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels argue that workers own no means of production and so have nothing to sell but themselves. Having no property, the worker must find work or starve, which makes the bargain unequal however free it appears.

  3. 3

    How does the Manifesto describe the worker as a commodity?

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels describe labourers as a commodity like every other article of commerce, exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition and to all the fluctuations of the market. Workers must sell themselves piecemeal to survive.

  4. 4

    What happens to the worker after being paid, according to the Manifesto?

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels argue that no sooner is the labourer paid in cash than he is set upon by the landlord, the shopkeeper and the pawnbroker. Exploitation continues beyond the factory gate.

  5. 5

    How does the division of labour affect the worker's skill and wages?

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels argue that as work loses its individual character it requires only the simplest handling, so the cost of producing a worker falls to the means of subsistence. Skill therefore ceases to protect wages.

  6. 6

    What does the Manifesto say about the employment of women and children?

    Model answer

    Marx and Engels argue that as machinery reduces the importance of muscular strength, women and children are drawn into the workforce and differences of age and sex lose their social validity for the working class. All become instruments of labour whose cost varies with age and sex.

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