Changes in Class and the Labor Force within Society

Changes in Class and the Labor Force within Society

Introduction:

Though the Industrial Revolution changed the course of modern history, the consequences that accompanied it divided society. The radical change in the division of class and labor within society because of industrialization disgusted many who witnessed it, including Karl Marx. Their contempt for the new composition of class and labor led to intellectuals proposing improvements and reversing changes, through their writings to the masses, introduced by the Industrial Revolution. The Communist Manifesto and writings by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels are specific in their views on the class and labor structure in Europe and abroad.

Class Structure

Marx saw three classes emerge from Capitalist industrial society: labor power, ones who possessed the means of production, and those who owned the land. Their incomes consisting of wages, profit from industry, and rent collected from their land. Industry created by the Bourgeois revitalized society into two separate classes, the bourgeois and the proletariat. Communism offered the opposite, no division of labor or class. Marx believed that by eliminating personal gain from society, the class structure of Capitalism would be broken. Marx proposed the individual would receive from the greater society an equal amount of the shared commodities in comparison to his production of work benefiting the whole. There is an exchange of equal values. Each person receives equal share in the possessions of the whole for equal work. The bourgeois dissolves as personal profit is eliminated. Thus, granting rule over society to the proletariat. Class disappears because everyone is the same. Everyone is a worker.

Free economic markets separates the means of production and the labor force. The result is the formation of an economically ruling class. The ruling class finds that labor equals only the means of production. Thus, the bourgeois pays the workers only the amount needed to sustain life. The proletariat is reduced to a life whose sole purpose is to find work. They only find work if their labor increases capital.

Communism's Answer to Class Structure

Communism offered the opposite, no division of labor or class. Marx believed that by eliminating personal gain from society, the class structure of Capitalism would be broken. Marx proposed the individual would receive from the greater society an equal amount of the shared commodities in comparison to his production of work benefiting the whole.