Marx and Bourgeois Society
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In the perspective of Karl Marx, the bourgeois society in which he lived and which persists to this day in the developed West was a system of class conflict and the domination of the bourgeois class over the proletarian class. Marx described the nature of this society not as an aberration but as a stage in social evolution, succeeding the feudal period and preceding the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. His view was based on the idea that these stages were inevitable and that the only way for the proletariat to gain a better position in life was through revolution, through the violent overthrow of bourgeois society. Yet, as we have seen in subsequent history, this is not the case, and while we have not produced a classless society, the classes are not in conflict to the degree Marx saw as inevitable and inescapable. Marx ascribed the social inequalities of society to class differences based on material inequalities separating the working class from the mode of production and from the product of their work in a form of social alienation. Karl Marx argues that bourgeois society is a system of domination, with the bourgeoisie dominant over the proletariat. The economic system that is explained in this fashion came about with the demise of the feudal society that preceded it. Marx says his own epoch is the epoch of the bourgeoisie that has simplified the class antagonisms that always define a society. Marx wrote: The modern bourgeois society that has sproute
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Bourgeois society is dominant because it controls the means of production, while the proletariat is alienated from the product of its labor because it does not own the means of production. In Marx's time, big industry was taking root throughout Europe. Engels wrote that Marx had shown how the bourgeois republic had developed out of the "social" Revolution of 1848 while grouping all the other social classes around the proletariat. Capitalism was increasing in power throughout Europe, and the industrial revolution of capitalism had produced clarity in class relations. The struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had originally existed only in France and England and in a few big industrial centers, but with the increase in industrialization, it had spread over all of Europe. Marx and Engels both felt that this increase in power and domination for the bourgeoisie would in time give power to the proletariat in reaction, and to this end Marx had defined the nature of the struggle to come:
At that time the masses, sundered and differing according to locality and nationality, linked only by the feeling of common suffering, undeveloped, helplessly tossed to and fro from enthusiasm to despair; today the one gre
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Approximate Word count = 1617
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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