How did Marx and Engels describe social classes and the relationship between them Does their description of social classes have any relevance for understanding contemporary society in Britain Explain your argument - Essay Example

After the preliminary introduction to this document, the first section is entitled “Bourgeois and Proletariat” and the opening salvo in their argument is the statement “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels, 1848, p. 3). The present study defines the meaning of these class-related terms as used by Marx and Engels, and then explains why they still have some relevance despite the evident failure of communism as a system across most of the modern world.

There is a basic assumption in the writings of these two authors, that human society is universally structured in a hierarchical fashion, with smaller number of ruling elites at the top, and large numbers of less wealthy and usually exploited workers at the bottom. The terms bourgeois and bourgeoisie are derived from French and they are used to describe a new kind of upper class which is no longer the inherited nobility of the past, but has become a product of new, industrial processes. The model for this concept is, however nineteenth century Germany (Singer, 1980, p. 29).The wealth of this class is derived from the labour of the ordinary people, who produce goods to be traded by the bourgeois factory owners on the free global markets.

The bourgeoisie have great economic power, which comes from their superior knowledge, and their ability to manipulate the markets of goods and services to their own advantage. The effect of this dynamic on ordinary workers is, in the view of these two authors, quite catastrophic: “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine.

” (Marx and Engels, 1948, p. 8). The term proletariat, therefore, means not just