The focus that I have selected for this short critical review is reading twelve from Marsh (1998 73:78) entitled Bourgeois and Proletarians: Marx's analysis of class relationships (1). This text was written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and drawn from Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1952) (1848) the manifesto of the communist party, Moscow: Progress, pp. 40-60.
Within this extract the authors are trying to address the theoretical problems surrounding class relationships between the bourgeois and the proletariat highlighting their inequalities and how the bourgeoisie creates this inequality for their own material gain. The extract also attempts to address the origins of capitalism and that the evolution of capitalism and any development or change from one form of society to another has as its direct cause conflict over the system of production. As well as bringing forward the concept of revolution as a force for social change.
In this extract Marx and Engels state that throughout history we see arrangements of social rank giving the example that "in ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs, in almost all these classes, subordinate gradations". This statement can be viewed as being a simple and obvious historical observation of social systems. However, Marx and Engels use this observation to give the concept that bourgeois society has developed from feudal origins and although the inequalities of the previous ancient and feudal societies have been abolished. The new bourgeois society has not made class conflict redundant but has instead established new classes and forms of oppression. These new forms of oppression have been put in place by the bourgeois who have ended the patriarchal idyllic relationships of feudal society and removed the feudal ties of man and his superiors and there is now remaining no relationship between man and man other than self interest and cash payments.